Love? I Don’t Need No Steenking Love!

Yeah, that title’s probably not the best sidle-in for a first essay, though I did get my account here more than a year ago. Mostly just a reader, until I got banned from DKos.

No, it wasn’t a 9-11 CT diary. I’ve long known better than to get involved in those, kept my opinions about that to myself. It was just an overview of things viral (i.e., influenza), how vaccine research works – and sometimes doesn’t – with a semi-humorous overtone that indeed was sort of conspiratorial in a Tom Cruise-ish way. I’m an auguste clown… tend to see humor in places the pompous white-face takes way too seriously. Occupational hazard.

I’m pretty jaded about many things the kossacks would consider CT-like. I’ve actually seen – and participated in, for nefarious purposes of investigation – government cover for an industry that enjoys NS protections built-in. In the matter of an Oops they all understood very well would cause death and disability to thousands of innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. SOP – Standard Operating Procedure. So after it became obvious that what really occurred in September of 2001 was never going to be public knowledge, I had no reason to buy the hokum just because 3,000 people died. So I didn’t.

Truth is, most of these sort of horrific historical events usually DO begin as an Oopses of one variety or another. Some are more insidiously foreshadowed than others, thus more inevitable. But all 9-11 took was a bunch of self-important bureaucrats ignoring all the foreshadowing so that the events became inevitable. What turns these things into conspiracies is almost always the cover-up that happens later. And in government – any government – CYA is SOP. When enough movers and shakers get involved in covering their own asses for their own Oopses they must in turn support other mover-shaker covers for other Oopses so the dominoes don’t ‘accidentally’ fall and destroy their clever covers. No smoke-filled back rooms necessary. Just a threat that incompetence will be found out. Or, on the industrial end of the complex, liability might ensue (no legitimate sovereign immunity).

But sorry, budhy. I didn’t join Kos for the love (I never saw much of that there), that’s not why I signed up here either. Get my love in more 4-dimensional places from people who actually care. Just following the news, the slants on the news, the conspiring to gain power, the conspiring to keep power, the Oopses that destroy power or must be covered-up, the various opinions about all that. Filling in the out-of-focus smudges on a picture of history that’s not filtered through a handful of ‘mainstream’ outlets that are mainstream because they’re the dutiful propaganda outlets of Those Who Conspire. [TWC – it’s what they do]. A mere lifelong interest in historical events and politics, fed by a new medium that’s way more democratic than dedicated propagandists will ever find comfortable.

All leaderships – all the many houses of power – are authoritarian by nature. It comes attached to the power itself. In a system such as ours, where the people are taught to believe they have a greater voice than the charter actually allows, about half of them are always on the ‘out’ side looking in and seeing Evil Writ Large. It doesn’t matter who holds the reins at any given time. Democrats see Republicans as evil, Republicans see Democrats as evil, all shifts in power distribution hinge on the few in the middle who aren’t fond of either of ’em but will vote for the lesser evil in the ever-changing game. In this simplification the fringes don’t count. And as always, everything else is herding cats.

So. Here I am. Thanks to budhydharma’s refuge for the opinionated!