One Big Reason Why America Is Driving Itself Bat$hit Crazy

[Guest]

Here’s one big reason that America is driving itself batshit crazy: the explosion of computerized records, emails, inter-office memos, Twitter trails, Facebook memorabilia, iPhone videos, YouTubes, recorded conversations, and the vast alternative universe of storage capacity for all this stuff makes it seem possible to constantly go back and reconstruct reality. All it has really done is amplified the potential for political mischief to suicide level.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com

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It’s a major unanticipated consequence of the digital “revolution.” It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we’d only be watching jumbotron replays while failing to pay attention to the action on the field. 

Before all this, history was left largely to historians, who curated it from a range of views for carefully considered introduction to the stream of human culture, and managed this process at a pace that allowed a polity to get on with its business at hand in the here-and-now — instead of incessantly and recursively reviewing events that have already happened 24/7. The more electronic media has evolved, the more it lends itself to manipulation, propaganda, and falsification of whatever happened five minutes, or five hours, or five weeks ago.

This is exactly why and how the losing team in the 2016 election has worked so hard to change that bit of history. The stupendous failure of the Mueller Investigation only revealed what can happen when extraordinary bad faith, dishonesty, and incompetence are brought to this project of reinventing “truth” — of who did what and why — while it provoked a counter-industry of detecting its gross falsifications.

This dynamic has long been systematically studied and applied by institutions like the so-called “intelligence community,” and has gotten so out-of-hand that its main mission these days appears to be the maximum gaslighting of the nation — for the purpose of its own desperate self-defense. The “Whistleblower” episode is the latest turn in dishonestly manipulated records, but the most interesting feature of it is that the release of the actual transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call did not affect the “narrative” precooked between the CIA and Adam Schiff’s House Intel Committee. They just blundered on with the story and when major parts of the replay didn’t add up, they retreated to secret sessions in the basement of the US capitol.

Perhaps you can see why unleashing the CIA, NSA, and the FBI on political enemies by Mr. Obama and his cohorts has become such a disaster. When that scheme blew up, the intel community went to the mattresses, as the saying goes in Mafia legend and lore. The “company” found itself at existential risk. Of course, the CIA has long been accused of following an agenda of its own simply because it had the means to do it. It had the manpower, the money, and the equipment to run whatever operations it felt like running, and a history of going its own way out of sheer institutional arrogance, of knowing better than the crackers and clowns elected by the hoi-polloi. The secrecy inherent in its charter was a green light for limitless mischief and some of the agency’s directors showed open contempt for the occupants of the White House. Think: Allen Dulles and William Casey. And lately, Mr. Brennan. 

The recently-spawned NSA has mainly added the capacity to turn everything that happens into replay material, since it is suspected of recording every phone call, every email, every financial transaction, every closed-circuit screen capture, and anything else its computers can snare for storage in its Utah Data Storage Center. Now you know why the actions of Edward Snowden were so significant. He did what he did because he was moral enough to know the face of malevolence when he saw it. That he survives in exile is a miracle.

As for the FBI, only an exceptional species of ineptitude explains the trouble they got themselves into with the RussiaGate fiasco. The unbelievable election loss of Mrs. Clinton screwed the pooch for them, and the desperate acts that followed only made things worse. The incompetence and mendacity on display was only matched by Mr. Mueller and his lawyers, who were supposed to be the FBI’s cleanup crew and only left a bigger mess — all of it cataloged in digital records.

Now, persons throughout all these agencies are waiting for the hammer to fall. If they are prosecuted, the process will entail yet another monumental excursion into the replaying of those digital records. It could go on for years. So, the final act in the collapse of the USA will be the government choking itself to death on replayed narratives from its own server farms.

In the meantime, events are actually tending in a direction that will eventually deprive the nation of the means to continue most of its accustomed activities including credible elections, food distribution, a reliable electric grid, and perhaps even self-defense.

Edited October 19, 2019 by Guest

[Boat + 1,323]

Most of the harmless drivel you post for information is kinda like the Chinese who’s children are threatened if they don’t tow the company line. Because nobody else is that “compromised” to believe such lunacy. You seem nice enough but have way to much time on your hands. 
the last paragraph might have a hint of truth considering we had thought Conservative Republicans were the last hope of financial lunacy but the current flock cut tax and spend in exorbant amounts.

Edited October 19, 2019 by Boat

[Guest]

LOL @Boat  , they're just articles of interest or consideration. And apparently harmless, unlike threatened Chinese children, to quote your own words. 

Block me then. It's pretty easy. You seem to always have time to follow me around, read them all and comment on them all? Seeing as they're all apparently drivel and harmless, but you follow them and comment, who is the one with time on their hands? And yes I've had a very good month so have a bit of time. I can admit it. You? It is very odd to me that instead of blocking me you choose this path of reading something you know you won't like anyway. You have even started to comment the same type of things on my blog.

How only the last part of the article has truth in it to you is a little baffling, but very telling. I'm guessing if the article was pro Dems and Obama and whistleblowers it wouldn't be drivel? This is why you seem to agree with the ending only. 

DISCLAIMER - DT IS NOT A JOURNALIST. Saying that I 'post for information' suggests you don't know this? 

https://community.oilprice.com/pastleaders/  Have a peek at this link. It seems others do not mind my posts and that if they think they and my comments are drivel, they are atleast popular drivel. I may block you sorry, as your new thing seems to be to follow me round, try to insult with a comment, then find some more of my posts, read them fully despite thinking they're nonsense before you read one line of it, and do it again?

I'm flattered but it's a bit odd, especially when you say I'm the one with time on my hands? You seem ok too and I may be wrong but I'm sensing an ongoing and rather tedious pattern here. Just to clarify, I posted trading stuff here today that some of the most intelligent people on the forum couldn't get their head around, and on the other side of the coin what I post is drivel? (when about politics and a dig at your particular party). Dunno why I bother here sometimes. 

Cheers.        #trump2020 #brexit #snowden #compromised #ignoreuser #drivelindeed

Edited October 19, 2019 by Guest