Archive for the 'Conspiracy Theories' Category

Lets face it…War is a racket!

President Obama has, I suspect in order to relieve his incredible work load, turned over the war to the generals. (Eventually he was bound to follow the path of least resistance.) The generals will, without question, continue GWB’s domino plan. His plan, if you’ll recall, was to go from Muslim country to Muslim country on a Christian Jihad dedicated to eradicating the Taliban. (More truthfully
perhaps, eliminating Muslims.) Evidently, that’s still our plan.

What should have been a rabbit hunt, where a few thousand of our elite special forces troops chase a few hundred of the 9/11 perpetrators into the mountains and caves, will be blown into $100 billion annual expenditure. The generals will attempt to justify a MacArthur style sweep throughout the Middle East. The fact that
Osama bin Laden, the ALLEGED target of our pursuit, has been dead these last 8 years doesn’t seem to dim the generals enthusiasm to hunt down and capture him.

The generals will fight this war phony with overworked, worn-out, suicidal troops. At least one soldier, when faced with yet a third tour to the Middle East, elected to end his own life rather than return. The suicide rate among the military is increasing monthly!

We will pay for this war on credit at our most critical economic point, when the stability of the nation’s economic and financial well-being is still in question. We will neglect the needs of this nation in favor of another useless and unproductive war on the other side of the planet. In spite of what our leaders tell us, it doesn’t take a big brain to realize what’s going on outside our borders has nothing to do with our national security. No country on the map today is crazy enough to take on the USA.

If our national security is weak it is because our National Guard is overseas. The rationale behind sending our national defense troops overseas is as substantial as fog. The really stupid part of what we are being expected to swallow by the war council is that the people in these countries subjected to our bombarding appreciate us. It really
takes a complete moron to even consider we may be able to win over the hearts and minds of a people by using guns and bombs on them.

We might stand a chance of winning over a nation’s people if we helped them to build schools or hospitals. If we helped the poorest of the world’s nations with their infrastructure; their roads or electrical grid or water resources. If we did so I suspect they would learn to love us in double quick time. As long as we abuse their country they will never love or even appreciate us. But imagine the noise and uproar the good citizens of this country would create if it were known we were upgrading their country before upgrading our own infrastructure. It is much more politically correct to bomb them first.

The insanity of continuing to do over and over what has failed in the past will continue to plague our future.

The people in this once great nation are either too poorly informed, too misguided, too greedy, or too apathetic to care what is done in their name.

We follow blindly the actions of our leaders for one overarching reason. We all believe our nation’s deciders know more than we do. We sincerely believe they have secret knowledge which, were we privy to it, would convince us the course we are on is true.

However, after watching the Bush/Cheney parade of people spouting the same lies over and over, I am convinced otherwise.

Fact: we are alienating the very people we are supposedly liberating. By indiscriminately killing them we couldn’t possibly do more harm to our long-term interest.

We have allowed our generals to bring to full living color the popular board game RISK. One huge difference between a game and real-life is at the end of the game the troops, with no enemies to face, presumably get to go home. Our troops will never come home.

To me the most important protection of our democracy

should be the insulation of our judicial system from corrupt

influences.  If justice comes down to who has the most money,

society as we know it would disintegrate.  For a society to

survive the people within it must, after all, believe in their elite. 

And they must have trust in the fairness of their judicial

systems.  The only other way to hold society together is

with a large internal “security” force.

In a national bestseller, “Personal Injuries”, Scott Turow

vividly describes what can go wrong when “The Judge” is on

the take. The story involves favorable rulings in personal

injury cases where insurance companies are on the hook

for huge settlements.  Common wisdom holds that insurance

companies use the pretext of those monstrous settlements

to charge their customers outrageous fees for what are in

actuality rare cases.  The lawyers get rich, the judges

(in these cases) get a nice bonus of some sort and the

insurance companies get to raise their rates. The plaintiffs

get hugely rewarded for their pain and suffering and as a final

tribute to a system gone horribly wrong, the evildoer is severely

punished.  Everyone involved is the winner, the insurance company

pays off, and if there is a loser somewhere, no one cares.

WE, the majority of people in USA, have a firm belief in our

democracy (with a few detractors), and a strong backbone

of religious and moral convictions. And WE overwhelmingly

support our judicial system.  I believe as a society WE feel shame

when the bad guy goes free (take OJ for example) or when the

good guy gets wrongly convicted (take the hundreds of inmates

recently freed from years of confinement by new DNA evidence).

So what in the world are WE thinking when WE allow the most

politically motivated, and by extension the most heavily influenced,

people in our society to –APPOINT– the judges who sit on the

highest benches in the land. Every honest person needs to believe

that the person presiding over a court of law, and possibly

sitting in judgment of him, will be impartial, which is inherently

an oxymoronic concept under these circumstances. Shouldn’t

WE the people be voting on these guys?

Who is telling the truth? 

Except for the liars, everyone is.

Unfortunately, we all view history through the lens of our own upbringing.  An ever-changing kaleidoscope of world events refracts the “truth” into a thousand prisms.  We each eventually pick a point of view of the world which is most pleasing, or least terrifying, to ourselves.  That view is focused and shaped by what we see and read daily.

Saul Bellow once said about the media, “nobody will be heard, who doesn’t speak in short bursts of truth”.  Bill Moyers recently reflected that news people need to speak in “bumper sticker” snippets to hold our attention.  Media mavens have seven seconds to grab us and make an impression before we are “gone” and on to something else mentally.

It would be simple arithmetic to hold the media responsible for our loss of depth perception.  But that would be wrong.  We are conditioned to accept specially crafted sound bytes.  Marshall McLuhan, back in the 70’s, wrote a blockbuster book exposing the medium as the message.  People have always had a tendency to view what they read as “truth, so help me God”.  Today people view what they see as the “truth”.  But as the written word is just a sound byte, the video is just an action byte, and only as real as we perceive it to be.

Here is a case in point.  The Bush administration focused our attention on terrorism after 9/11 and in true Barnum and Bailey sleight of hand switched our focus to Iraq.  Although one had nothing to do with the other, we followed the sound bytes and believed the video clips, and “agreed” Iraq needed to be punished.  Most recently, a concerted military effort has been made to link the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq to Iran.  Over 20,000 weapons were assembled from various armed engagements, and military experts were tasked to find a link back to the source — Iran.  Of course, no tangible link exists.  But many will follow this “sleight-of-hand” maneuver and accept the inevitability of a war with Iran.

We would do well to remember a former writer named Len de Caux, who said in “Armies Of The Poor”: “Sometimes I’d hear a Communist speaker say something so bitter and extreme I’d feel embarrassed.  Then I’d look around at the unemployed audience — shabby clothes, expressions worried and sour.  Faces would start to glow, heads to nod, and hands to clap.”  So here we are again, and to the thousands who protested before the war began and the hundreds of thousands since, the Bush administration says, more or less, “So?”  Well, my face is glowing, my head is nodding, and I’m clapping my hands!  And I am no communist.

Governments of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy are never sustainable; such empires always fall from within.  The wealthy have been leading this charge over the cliff with their golden parachutes and laser guided bombs.  Hopefully we will learn that arrogance and greed have no place in a democracy.  And we will reorganize ourselves accordingly.

     Most people have heard whispers for decades about more fuel efficient carburetors which can deliver huge increases in mileage. The geniuses (or lucky stumblers) who discover these boons to all mankind sell the patents for a few million bucks to leave the life of a poor starving inventor behind. The giant corporations who purchase the technology sit on it because, the theory goes, they are better off preserving the status quo. Retooling or retro-fitting is expensive, but that is not the reason. The real reason is because the major stock owners also own stock in related industries, like oil and gas. The combined losses from declines in sales of those products would result in stock price reductions which would far outweigh the gain in their GM stock.

     Another great conspiracy involves the JFK assassination. According to many researchers and lawyers close to the situation at the time, the mob was responsible for Kennedy’s death. The theory holds that the mob had developed a huge gambling mecca 90 miles offshore in Havana, Cuba. They were looking to the president to invade Cuba to insure against the loss of their holdings. When Kennedy called off the Bay of Pigs invasion they lost millions, so to preserve their reputation, the president had to go.

     As horrific and disgusting as these scenarios would be, if true, they didn’t directly affect the bulk of humanity at the time. Sure we would have had more money in our pockets and would breathe cleaner air. But most of us don’t belly up to the blackjack table in a big way, and air quality wasn’t a very big concern back then. Besides, a few greedy CEOs enriching their shareholders at the expense of the many is no new news: Heck, it’s the American Way. But what if there was a cure for the greatest scourge to mankind in history, cancer? Is it conceivable that the giant drug companies would sit on something like that?

     According to Jenny Thompson, director of the Health Sciences Institute, they can, and do. Researchers at the Institute have shown that extracts from a tree deep in the Amazon Jungle (of course) can safely attack cancer without causing debilitating side effects like severe nausea or hair and weight loss. The reason this miracle tree’s extracts are not available is simple. After years of trying, at a cost in the millions, the drug company wasn’t able to synthesize the protein responsible for the beneficial effects. Because the tree’s extracts are completely natural and therefore unpatentable under federal law, the company saw no way to make a killing on its discovery. Further, an inexpensive solution to the world’s number one health problem would undermine the giant revenue streams from other, albeit inferior, products already in place. From a corporate standpoint the only course of action was to bury the research. Releasing such a breakthrough would be akin to committing corporate suicide by the captains in charge.

     How many people die in vain, or in pain, is not on the radar screen of a corporate chief. Only profit matters and protecting the bottom line is job one. But wouldn’t it be nice to imagine a saner world where people mattered more than money? A world where the goodwill that came from self-sacrificing deeds and acts of charity weighed as heavily as cash in the bank? In fact, isn’t the area of health care a proper place for the government to invest our billions? Instead of being stewards of the weapons of mass destruction, shouldn’t governments everywhere concentrate on improving the welfare of their citizens? In a sane world would a government invest 1800 billions of dollars in a useless war of destruction abroad and deny its own citizens 18 billion dollars for the health care of its most needy children? Isn’t it time we reordered our priorities?
            Bob Parmelee