Burn Realpolitik

This is Justin Raimondo writing through Anti-War.com:

"A Mousavi government in power in Tehran would not necessarily be friendlier to Israel, and yet it is unmistakably true that the sort of reflexive hostility to the US exhibited by Ahmadinejad would no longer prevail. The only way to effectively deny this — as Obama has done — is to conflate Israeli and American interests. Both Washington and Tel Aviv fully realize their interests are diverging, and yet neither side has been able to say so publicly, and unequivocally, for domestic political reasons. The Americans are constrained by their vociferous Israel lobby, just as the Netanyahu government is reined in by the unwillingness of the Israeli public to take on its biggest ally and chief sponsor."

Raimondo is a very perceptive, libertarian writer who absolutely sees between the lines. So my criticism is not intended to him in any way. He's to be rewarded for his courage and integrity.

What is worth singling out though is this line "Americans are constrained by their vociferous Israel lobby..." Now anybody paying attention knows that there are lobbies and that Israel and the US are long time bed mates; we send a bunch of money their way and the powerful Israelis lobby congress by more campaign money and so on and so forth.

But for the love of Christ, we've gotten to the point where lobbies aren't even criticized anymore. What fucking good is any of this govt. on govt. handjob shit doing the citizens of the United States?

Well, none.

So why is it called real politik? This isn't real, this is bullshit. This moneyed interest sucking off moneyed interest and slapping at the other girl trying to crawl in bed. This is ignoring the basic tenets of law. This ignoring basic morality.

Lies.

Even in so-called real politik terms, what would be the upshot if the US just finally pulled its collective head out of its ass and let sovereign nations do whatever they're going to do? If Israel can't get over the fact that biblical scripture doesnt apply to reality and they decide to decimate Iran or Iran decides to decimate Israel. Then so be it, why is this our problem?

Yes, yes all the bullshit about American being the world's policeman and probably detractors of simple truth would now at this point in the questioning decide to get moralistic and say, Well so you advocate the extermination of whole countries? You're a piece of shit.

Or those who cite the bottomline to justify their ridiculous greed will say that economic stability requires that the middle east be stable and Iran and Israel and the Arabs need to get along blah blah blah.

Yes, it's true. They do need to get along. But it's not moral to get involved and then siphon off the profits and determine who will win and who will lose. Who will get to settle in some shit hole in the desert and who has to live under constant tyranny.

Why not just let them stare each other down? If they're stupid enough to do it, then fuck it. They can do it. Turn it into a sheet of glass.

Look how far away we are from the interests of the average American? There are surely a million little ways that the middle east situation can go. Lots of variables. But I return to the original question: why does a foreign lobby account for more weight when it comes to policy than the voice of actual, American citizens?

More to the point, why isn't this question even on the fucking table?

We've become inured to the fact that we mean nothing and the govt is not for the people. And it sure as fuck is not by the people. It's by the lobbies.

Death, The Next Big Thing

An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death. - Freya Stark


The last 200 years took humanity on a fucking ride. And that ride is coming into a deep, blind curve. It was with eerie precision that an explosive upward trend in oil production was matched step for step by an equally amazing increase in sheer quantities of human flesh. We’ve gone from roughly a billion to nearly seven billion bodies since the time that drilling rigs were perfected.

In great leaps there was the railcar, automobile, the plane, the interstate highway system and the internet. These, and all events, were punctuated between with spikes and a constant under-hum of imperialistic war being waged around the globe in various guises-- the IMF, humanitarian aid, intervention and so on.

At some recent point, some cite JFK’s assassination, domesticity as an ideological and practical thing soured at the base and now the rot has reached within view of anyone with eyes to see. All manner of mainstream news sources offer hints at what lies below the surface of a rather American veil woven of denial, arrogance and fear. Traits that served at one time to perpetuate the national experiment, dressed up as patriotism, necessity or confident leadership now seem very much like cruel jokes.

Much is written, more than ever before perhaps, about the demise of the U.S. superpower, the middle class and even civilization itself. Much is written about what ails us and how we medicate it at great, unseen costs. Cornucopian snake oil salesmen seek every angle to assuage the sense of doom roiling on the periphery of our American experiment.

Query: how many important decisions over the past fifteen years were made under the influence of Xanax, Zoloft and their like, and what is the collective result when so many operating in the most stressful jobs decide to turn off the mental light and yet still keep fiddling with the societal control knobs?

And now a world, literally, sits perched on the sidelines waiting with varying degrees of hope and despair for the diamond precise decisions that are needed to right a great, creaking ship as it steers to an unknown world that was once, not so long ago, flat.

Thomas Friedman’s recent article highlighting a certain grandiose laser-fed energy panacea speaks volumes about our realities, limitations and desperation. The author rightly states that all things going smoothly, a single new prototype is still a few years out. He says nothing of the potential resistance of established energy titans working in coal and petroleum products.

A select group, perhaps not too dissimilar from the laser makers above, have spoken of a technological singularity event that would forever alter the human trajectory. Considered inevitable by some, the merger of artificial intelligence and human consciousness suggests a radical, indeterminate departure from normality, indeed from human history altogether, as we would cease to be entirely human and simultaneously lose our spot at the top of the food chain. One supposes this event of peak control over technology would tend to gouge our hegemonic grasp on the discussion altogether, as technology might literally become out of control as machines surpassed us in raw intelligence. Such as the sci-fi inspired and appropriately gravitas laden term, singularity would suggest, it would be the last deal to go down with humanity at the reins. We would be forever at the behest of smarter objects, which at times like these seems like not such a bad idea.

Maybe, maybe not.

As again, those at the helm who have of late been exposed for their supremacy in both incompetence and greed might well pull off their proposed, counterintuitive and superhuman feats of worldwide, financial algorithmic corrections. Again, maybe so, maybe not.

Goldman Sachs might toss AIG to the hordes, the earth might return from wobble to spin and Africa might continue to be the asshole of the world where empire can go to be dirty and undetected; for Vegas, New York and Los Angeles residents, life might continue to have some semblance of sustainability. Every hardworking first world citizen might hold tight for a bit longer the illusion that it is not a connected world and that there is no instant karma—John Lennon be damned, if need be.

The question boils down to resource limitations and yet this question is not being openly discussed in the mainstream. But tell us something we don’t know, you say.

To remain in this particular dream or whatever other chimera is set to offer a continuity, we reasonable folks have to grapple the question of finitude. The only new bubble that seems to be bandied about right now is renewable energy, and rightly so. Oil is done, coal is nasty and studies point out that no single source, nor any combination of the present options (wind, wave, biofuel, hydrogen, etc.), will replace oil for sheer energy return on energy invested. Thus Friedman’s laser plug. And so, we reasonable folks must ask again: what next? No matter the design, a new economy must accept that bubbles break, money must ultimately represent something of value and the indisputable fact—despite what The Secret tells you---is that resources are finite.

Among the reasonable exists a subset of people who also note that the obvious tendency toward full-on, death-becomes-us resource wars is not only atrociously immoral, but ultimately nothing more than a reprieve on the same basic question: what next?

If you don’t see things so pessimistically, perhaps you might ask why we are bombing civilians in nuclear Pakistan. Or, closer to home, aren’t those real, live lobbyists in the present administration? Didn’t he promise not to do that? Or, philosophically, is the Patriot Act something a true progressive would tolerate? If not, then why the lack of outrage or media coverage of what small outrage there is?

Looking to history for answers, one might surmise that at some time in our distant, near primordial past, there occurred some other singularity-like event that precluded our mastery of the mathematics that gets us in so much trouble now. Whether it was a singularity proper, or some other equally magnanimous event, something precluded our tendency to bury our dead and shit at a reasonable distance from the campfire and our abilities to organize around great symbols to effect massive releases of energy—the cross, the flag, E=mc2.

I submit that the techno-wizards are to be commended for at least the spirit of their prognostications, because we in fact are at the door to an enormous, uncertain future. One containing surprises and innovation, which in retrospect, might seem to the future human as inevitable and necessary as burying our dead seems to us now—which is to say the future will hopefully be sufficiently embarrassed with our tomfoolery and grateful for the McGuffin upon which we now wait.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has not only recently offered his own stimulus package via his blog, but followed up quickly with a major question for the world: what is the next Big thing? It’s not the internet because that has stabilized and become ubiquitous. It’s not housing because there are plenty of homeless and plenty of empty houses. It’s not further Frankensteinian banking, as we’ve seen what that leads to. And it’s not a continuation of a consumer economy because we’re all stocked up on plastic toys and wishing we had thought twice before sending our phone service jobs to India. It might be renewable energy, but in truth the obstacles in terms of retrofitting existing infrastructure, cash outlays for startups, and the fact that research and development are constantly hindered by established energy entities all cause both consternation and delay. Delay breeds second thought and singularity events seem to arrive not from entirely rational processes like second thought, but rather through a kind of collective impulse or inevitability that lies beyond thought. At least for the non-technicians and philosophers among us.

We might know exactly how to conjure next big things someday and we might not, as apparently most things are open still to interpretation. Consider that until only a few weeks ago, Friedman thought the world was flat and now look…it is a big circle where what goes around comes around. Amazing.

In all this and in the concomitant fanfare and in the untold oceans of time spent by humans at various enterprises like work and play and theological debate, in all of it up till now we have had a solitary constant in the form of death. It is our guiding principle: whether we like it or not, there is a timeframe to this endeavor called life. Fluctuations in the market might increase or decrease the prevalence of death’s visits, thereby increasing the tendency towards a greater solipsistic narcissism over at Reagan’s shiny city on the hill, but generally speaking the Reaper is the most reliable, most unwavering and unencumbered guy we know.

He gets to everything, eventually. Is it a natural then that we’d turn to him in our worldwide panic-search for the next bubble? Probably not. We know he’s not open to negotiation, despite stem cell research thus far. And we’re really left wondering if he can even be mitigated or stalled in the elevator, as it were. Most everyone alive has been hearing about cancer breakthroughs and failed to see even one of them.

And yet, among that which we’ve shed in the last few decades or so in this peak of industrialization has been the renunciation of a proximity to death. We’ve sought to ditch death in any way possible and ignore its dominion. In the sci-fi fantasy of an ever-imminent cyborg singularity event, as with the laser-led bid for free energy, the clear intention is to further distance our individual selves and society from death in the abstract and the tangible. It is seen of course in the pharmaceutical industry’s constant promulgation of anxiety reducing drugs and their corresponding propaganda and the corresponding incompetence witnessed like never before among our so called leaders, gatekeepers and societal and financial operators.

As a nation we listen to slogans like: Feel like you again. And: Enjoy the moment. Or the broad hitting: Do you wish things where different? Whatever.

Odds are quite good that many of the leaders we call on now to make decisions in the present storm are ingesting these exact drugs which are designed to reduce anxiety, even if it is a reasonable anxiety such as one might experience were he or she say, called on to deal with the specter of nuclear war or a global financial crisis or an entire imploding industry or two, or multiple wars and rumors of wars. These drugs lower the stakes of the immediate problems for sure, yet they must also lower the stakes of things in general---of lives and nations and circumstances around the globe.

That is to say quivering reader, that it’s a generally reasonable assumption, given our present rates of anxiety reducing drug intake, that our futures are being determined right now by people who literally cannot fathom, due to altered neural activity, the value of the chips on the table and if you haven’t figured it out yet—we are in fact, the chips. Money represents the ability to do work, by either human, mineral or machine.

Enter again, death.
In the original singularity event, whatever it was---psychedelic mushrooms, atmospheric pressure changes, slight alterations in the hemispheres of the brain, whatever—we embraced death as something we would attempt to manage in a meaningful way, even if that was merely ritual. And it largely was ritual, and we somehow pounded out a meaning, perhaps, ecologically sound, to the interning of our dead friends and relatives in the earth. Or we relegated them to the fire and the wind to carry on in other forms. It made sense, it was what happened anyway to dead bodies so why not speed the process, embrace it and move on with dignity. The actions altered sanitary circumstances and our relationships to scavengers. Along the way, this must have forced a closer, tangible interaction with death and dead bodies and the smell and feel of things in all stages of the recollection of flesh.

Hemingway memorably attempted to place the uniqueness of the odor, though words will always fail at this. So too, do they fail in describing the feel, taste and in the end, all the salient elements of human and animal demise.

These rituals we set forth in the place of words, extended into and morphed around complex superstitions, creating further superstitions, belief systems and all manner of divergent cultural attitudes tuned to geographical necessity (try burying something in sand or among predatory scavengers, and you’ll see why cairns of rocks were a popular option). Ultimately, across all borders and classifications humans became intimate, if weary, companions with death. It was anthropomorphized and mythologized and rethought and redrawn and ridiculed and always relied upon, everywhere.

Several cultures around the world still have a certain acute relationship with both death actual and the fetishized image of it. Some have attributed weeks to its worship and developed highly advanced networks of cultural response to the great leveler. However, in America we have sprung up a strange but no less nuanced relationship with it, one of severe negative returns; one possessing all the features of the dysfunction that arises around absentee fathers and disinterested institutions. Children perpetuate adolescence via unconscious dramas which are driven by deep narratives of worthlessness and abandonment. They fail to understand responsibility having never seen it exercised in either the public or private spheres.

At every turn we see these dramas played out on the macro and micro, in celebrity life and in the small town murder/suicide reportage that seems to multiply in concordance with the irresponsibility and lack of justice evidenced on Wall Street and in Washington. It is as if we are flirting with death without recognizing the real potential of it crossing the room to seize us. We disrespect, dishonor and seek to replicate for commercial purposes all the features of death while sidestepping all of the reality of it.

Witness any parent dropping their child at the multiplex to be babysat by the latest slasher film. Or note the moment after the water cooler discussion of a relative’s death, the one where your colleagues switch gears to scramble for their amusement in the form of an iPod, an errand, happy hour. One could make a pretty solid argument that the options available to fill that disconcerting void make up the overwhelming sum and substance of our economy.

We turn to media and see the virtual fathers of our nation, the congressmen and women lie to their constituents and in the falsified testimonies we experience the undertone of worthlessness reflected and expressed at both ends—liar and recipient of lies.

In a world where entire systems of global commerce are riddled with falsehoods from top to bottom—full faith of the U.S. government-- and where even the backlash is ministrated upon by yet more liars---fair and balanced-- and where Xanax-quelled politicians pretend—two party system---to fight over the steering wheel attached to a ship cresting the lip of the great chasm, in a world and country such as this I would suggest a strange, regulatory proposition: that we confront the pervasive, obnoxious and relentless degradation of our relationship with death.

Forget about Thain, Cramer, Obama, Biden, Bush and Bernanke and all the other transient players and all their shenanigans. They are mobile; they are masks on an underlying framework that runs itself and is ultimately unworthy or our attention. They rob us, or rather we rob ourselves by pretending that death is not the central feature of ours and every life. The hard fact of each life is that it ends, and the same fate extends to systems.

Forget about revolution, forget about salvation, forget and forgive the bankers with their looting and the pharmaceutical companies and their patented schemes to alleviate your natural anxiety, an anxiety which is rooted timeless and forever in your natural existence as a human being. And forget the American dream, for the irony is that it has long since embraced its proximity to death, merged with it in fact.

But, but, but we say, man cannot tolerate too much reality.

Returning then for the purposes of edification and clarity to the oddity of the death relationship, one weird feature that presents itself and which is worth noting, is the inversion of our expressed priorities via the manipulation of what Freud called the death drive. Simply stated where we find ourselves is at a vast, detrimental distance from death in terms of its priority in our consciousness---indeed, it seems every effort, every wasted binary post on a celebrity life, or a Federal Reserve which is in fact not federal at all, is time lost to both sender and receiver---while at the same time we leap forward to a collective, actual, apocalyptic death with hands over our eyes and those leaps being described for us in terms that are devoid of authentic semantic resonance: prioritizing a response to genocide; nuclear ambitions; electronic social networking, and on and on and on.

We have within the era of the industrial revolution and technological and information ages, sought at every opportunity to increase the distance between ourselves and death, but it is time to man and wo-man up; it is time to not only to accept reality as unfair and oddly turned for adult response but also to acknowledge the death drive we’ve neglected to mitigate.

The Zen saying goes: when the Tao is lost, men speak of good and evil.

Within the geometry of the Tao exist both life and death and neither are good or evil. And we have by any imaginable measure, completely lost the Tao.

A healthy respect for death brings perspective, almost immediately. A proper cognizance of our mortality breeds respect for the struggles faced by our fellows, and offers insight to the larger importance of love, relationships, courage, trust---words that exist mostly now as concepts for screenwriters to utilize in story arcs and character development blather, as they are hardly ever witnessed in real life and when they are it’s generally only in the slice of time before someone attempts to replicate its passing for profit.


Some wise person along the way pointed out, that dying is not such a big deal, it is just not breathing in anymore. And while this is essentially true it can also be a dangerous simplification when placed in a context where instant gratification rules all, and where our various departments of oversight have long developed and implemented a calculus to determine the value of human life. So I propose a slightly more macabre and utilitarian explication of death, one that jives nicely with reality as described by science: death is the end of life as you know it. Period.

It is the last breath for the person experiencing death, but much more for the living. It is a ripping away and a cruel diminution of wishes and dreams and plans. It is a period of uncertain time where the mind habitually returns to the world where some man or woman used to be. And the mind reels from this unfair alteration to its routine. Emotions concur, often violently. It is also other more sensory things—stench, both of decay and often expelled waste. It can be a gruesome experience to lift a dead body post rigor mortis. Indeed, perhaps nothing shows the swift reclamation upon the flesh, often vibrant and flushed just a half hour before.

To close, it simply seems wise to this human being to accept reality, particularly when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing or where you’re going. Survivors often speak of a moment where the fear and confusion reached a peak and there, they simply decided they would live, they determined it, and that was just the end of the discussion. If we are to survive however, we need to do the other thing survivors typically do, which is perceive that they are in peril.

The earth will not hear our whining and decide to create another resource for us to exploit for continued expansion. It will also not increase in size such that we might cram another few billion people comfortably aboard. The fearful fact that our navigators cannot bring themselves to share is that death is our next great bubble; our next bull market may very well be, for a time, in mortuaries or masks to shield us from the particulate-loaded smell of decay wafting around the world.

There is an end to empire and without another bubble to create of actual material wealth, this is most likely that end. Acquaint yourself with death, fabricate your lore to manage its corrosion on your mind, militate against its dissolution of your dreams, accept the passing of your illusions. For make no mistake, this planet is over shot in population by a good, wide margin and unless the drug soaked leaders can flog the tech wizards into creating a functional, sustainable energy source and actually delivering it within the mystical two year prediction we are going to need to rekindle and understand our relationship to death in a meaningful way. But don’t take my opinion, hear the greats:

Shakespeare remarked: A man can die but once: we owe God a death. This is true.

Petrarch said, A good death does honor to a whole life. Also true, and worthy of consideration in terms of our involvement with each other.

The bankers might look up Montagne, who said: Death pays all debts. Or maybe they already have.

Excerpt From Two Deserts Collide

Lauren Groff pulled the original version of this paragraph out as being unstable. In the conception of it, the point was to shore up some of the metaphysics behind the pastoral sequence which precedes it. I think it got a bit out of hand mostly because I was trying to blend about three discreet theses into a generalized summation, while also not being totally didactic. I wanted there to be some wiggle room in the statements in terms of their argument and allusions. I also wanted it to be darker than it first was. Breaking the first section into smaller chapters worked. Here's the revamped, without context and so presumably altogether esoteric:

Above it all a desert sun beat down to infiltrate its light upon each shape and each permutation of shape, as if to the very quarks of them. To the hand upon the tool and the heart that moved the hand. And even to the secret fears within the heart, those as essential to the lives of men as the very passages of day and night. And the light bore in its makeup, a kernel of knowledge that was lost in the deliverance, for as darkness is the light’s corollary, it has its own terrible kernel, which was fast in its coming now and would arrive to them, as always, from distal points between sun and moon and earth, and the matrix men must make of them to set before gods, manifest in symbol or matter.

Free Your Mind

A more useful way to understand the political spectrum is on a scale of power or control as in:


Total Control............................Zero Control.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
State vs. Populace
Oligarchy vs. Anarchy


If you try and apply the labels of left/right or conservative/liberal or Limbaugh/Matthews up there what you find is that they all end up being in the same place: Total Control or very near it.

Lauren Groff's Second Voice

This is from Lauren Groff's blog/news column, which can be found on her website.

Astonishing expression.

Chances are... (2009-03-11)

...you were one of either two creatures: the shy, wary, squinty-eyed kid who hid in the long grass when it was kickball time and could make embarrassing noises with bodyparts or ad hoc instruments (grassblades, combs, paperclips) and talked aloud to characters you read alive and believed that when you left the room all humans powered down like robots hitting the off-switch only to reanimate when you were about to come back in; or you were the slighty cool, slightly sarcastic, slightly witty other type who was pretty good in sports and school, though when you saw the moon on a certain summer night or a graveyard washed slick as a wet eraser or heard your little sister singing to herself when she thought she was sitting alone in a blueberry bush, your heart did a curious flip and you felt like weeping and you wanted to weep and you would have wept if your buddies weren't around; and it is possible that you were some mix of both though rare if you were none of either (still--there are iconoclasts, always, in these matters); and so you were predisposed for the day when you woke into the calm, cold morning and stayed in bed for that extra minute and there you dreamt and walked through the day in that dream, which led you to pick up the pen, which led you to expel that dream onto paper, and so you began, and began slowly as these things always began, and you kept it quiet and you kept it sweet, your private things, deeper and more private than anything, and then you did better things, poems or stories; and because you did these things the way you read, with your whole body, your whole soul, they were so beautiful to you that you could hardly read them again, they felt like a wound you had inflicted on yourself, but good; until, one day, you showed your own poor things to a friend or a teacher or a mother or a little sister who could barely read just yet, but who subsequently named the smartest-looking doll in her collection after you, nonetheless; and warmed by this warmth of others, you kept on, you did it, you did it through high school, then college if you went to college; and after, if there was an after, and you did it with passion and you did it every single day, you did because once in a while you could make your chest open up and sing; and you did it still longer, until you could somehow open your chest at will; and you did it even more until you grew a zipper there and could unzip yourself and make everything in your chest sing; and you did it even more until the zipperteeth grew into real teeth, made of nerve and enamel, and the wound's lips had grown into real lips, and that's when you realized that you'd grown another mouth in your chest and all that you did went in, and when you sat down everything came out of that new mouth, and you rode this until the end of the wave, at which time you had a manuscript, complete; and it was published; this one, or or the one after, or the one after that. Then it was a whole new game, strange and confusing and new; and because you were either type one child, or type two, and were the kind already nervy and impressionable and soft; and because you were so used to being able to unzip your chest and let it all out, you didn't realize that this was not appropriate now. You didn't realize, until very late, that having a gaping mouth in your chest was the exact wrong thing for this new business, that wherever you turned, what had made you suited for this first job killed you a little in the second; that every blog and review and comment by your friends and family; that every silence, of reviews and blogs and friends and family, and every hesitation, and every poorly-chosen adjective, and every conspicuous overlooking, and every non-conspicuous overlooking, would fill this mouth with a bitter taste and make it pucker up to a wee little mouth instead of a great, glorious open one; and this is the worst thing, the very worst, that you were so busy filling this mouth with bitterness that you could no longer open the mouth, or zipper, or wound; you could no longer pour out everything in your chest, and paper became your enemy, no longer your friend, and what was only joy had become only poison, and you could not do what you wanted, no matter how you tried. You were extremely sad. You fretted. If you were foolish, you drank too much. But this is most important: you didn't give up. You woke every day and had coffee every day and sat at your desk every day, maybe despairing, but always there. You tried coaxing your chest-mouth with music, with chocolate, with long walks and heart-to-hearts with a profoundly apathetic dog. You tried babytalking your mouth, giving it splendid warm bubblebaths, and feeding it butterflies and phrenological heads and monsters made of porcelain, anything, anything that roused a flicker of awe or delight in your chest; you fed it books and books, more books than you ever dreamed would fit inside you, more books than would fit into an ogre's gullet, and you ate them until you, slowly, felt it coming back. Because it did. And it will. And it doesn't mean that a silence or overlooking or crass word won't hurt you; it will, you were made that way. But, and this is what is most important to understand; you also made yourself that way, and you can, you absolutely can, make yourself that way again.

Media Pranks

One of my favorite things to do to kill a few minutes here and there is to go over to Huffington Post and fuck with them. Try it it's fun, and unfortunately probably harmless.

An exercise: Pick any random, watered down, diversionary, waste of time article. Now don't even read it because you already know it's bullshit. Just go to the comments section and insert a link to an actual article.

For example, today you could pick your propaganda piece and insert your own absolutely true statement like this: Obama has already reneged on his campaign promises.

If you're feeling generous or patriotic or delusional that one of those caught in the tidal wave of death impulse that is the present political blindness epidemic, then you can give them a link too.

Like this one: http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=91286

Now the plausibility of actually getting one of deaf/dumb/blind to go there is small. Even smaller odds are on the potential of that person reading. And finally, I really don't know if there's a way to calculate the fraction of a percentage of hope that that person will follow the links in that story to verify and thus, be forced to examine their reality.

But what the fuck right, it's better than doing nothing for those folks.

The Way the World Works Is Simple. Horrible

The two most important elements required in the endeavor to understand the world are heart and money. Follow the money, is the throw away phrase that gets you beyond conspiracy theory and to conspiracy fact. Heart is what is demanded of you when you manage to follow the money. Because what lies there waiting is horrific to such a degree that no amount of preparation or black humor can really deal with the totality of the atrocity with any measurable success.

Consider this single image:

Now this:

Any Questions?

This is not always going to be a scenario isolated to a distant country. Empire knows no patriotism and no borders. An international currency would bring the atrocious social equation much closer to home.