PERCOULATION

THOUGHTS THAT MERELY SEEM RANDOM, BUT THEY AREN'T

I can't say from where the germ of conspiracy first affected me. Whenever I would hear people talk of a 'they', I wanted to know who 'they' was. There are still traces of the twerpy kid who once thought that being an entomologist would be a cool job still rattles around in me and why I didn't make that a pursuit is one of the grand mysteries of my life, more than many of the 'hits and misses' that I have shared here. Had I followed that interest, then maybe I would be somewhere in the middle of the vortex, spinning and shaping the thoughts of the masses.

Memorial Day I had posted and then deleted an entry that I hoped would bring into question how supportive of the troops are people when they didn't demand more of the Bush administation before sending them into harms way. It also wound its way around to how the administration wrongly took the goodwill and understanding as a result of the terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center, to instead engage in a war that prolly was born in a think-tank outside of legislative control.

I thought that I would have stepped on a toe or two in posting my ramblings. Was offending someone worth my twerking someone the wrong way? Eh, so I decided to shelve the post. The thoughts remained because I read the paper and that is where you find links to those who sit above in shadow (or I am the only cat who can't wait for more 'Rubicon' on AMC to come back?) and get a glimmer of the manipulation that is going on in public policy.

Since I don't have ANYONE to talk to about this kind of thing, it built up until David Dust made this post about how the Republican's aren't doing the American people any favors. Since one of the more recreational bloggers in the world (what with his 'dust bunnies' and themed model posts, I think that he keeps it fun and light, keeping 'issue' posts directed at his particular causes) made a pointed political observation, I started to wonder why does the Republican Party seem to be so insensitive to the problems that negatively affects the people that need help the most? And while it is cliched, why do they favor the rich over the working class?

When I finally saw and heard what Rep. Barton said at the subcommittee hearing on the BP oil spill was chilling. It isn't only that he said it and went to some length to say it was his personal opinion, but that he is THE go to guy the Energy and Commerce committee. He makes allusions to the BP corporation as being an individual... keeping in mind how the Supreme Court has recently allowed law to be passed that gives corporations status as individuals when it comes to donating to political campaigns, that he sees BP as being persecuted as an individual gives me the shivers.

"I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where anytime a citizen or a corporation does someting that is legitimately wrong, is subject to political pressure..." -excerpt from Sen. Barton's statement to Tony Hayward of BP.

WHAT THE--? Did he really say that and MEAN IT??

While I am sure Rep. Barton has rendered himself toxic in the congress, what he did was the equivalent of 'taking one for the team'. He made a huge miscalculation and while I will let the talking heads parse what it meant (on the McNeil Report, it was seen as the antagonism the GOP has for Pres. Obama running deep and boiling up in Barton's words). What I got from it was an erosion of the public's tolerance for seeing coporations as monoliths. Because how far is it from seeing the 'future BP's' as innocent until proven guilty and their having gone thru a legal process that for all its good, tends to favor the rich and powerful no matter what?

I GUESS IN TEXAS, THEY DON'T NEED NO EDUCATION...

... but nationally, we don't need no thought control.

Now that the idea of being fair to these huge corporations has been introduced, I ask myself about the impact this is going to have on how far it alters public and social thinking. The rambling anti-intellectualism that I thought only existed in the ghettos of our big cities and on the rural fringes has started to make inroads into mainstream society. Raise your hands if you think this is how the Dark Ages was ushered in? Some of the same elements are present and are growing stronger everyday, that led to the era that brought us the plague, the misguided Crusades and feudalism.


Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. -Pres. Woodrow Wilson

That was said back in the teens of the 20th Century... by THE FREAKIN' PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! If you want to be dismissive of people who like 'the lone gunmen' of 'The X-files', take small shreds of possiblity and create explinations that seem irrational, remember that A PRESIDENT admitted that there was a group of people in power who operated above him.

He wasn't the only President to admit that there was a cabal of people who superceded presidential power. President Kennedy in a speech acknowledged the existance of this group in a speech given in 1963...

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence on infiltration instead of invasion. On subversion instead of election, on intimidation, instead of free choice. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combine military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned no secret is revealed. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime that any citizen shrinks from controversy. I am asking your help in the tremendous task of alerting and informing the American People. I am confident that with your help man will be as he is meant to be—free and independent.

... AND Y'ALL THOUGHT IT WAS A SIMPLE IDIOSYNCRASY

If people who held the office that is now being advertised as 'the most powerful man in the world' could feel the prescence of this kind of power and be helpless to it, how much more so that I, an undereducated and intellectually lazy cat like me, feels? If I didn't know what I do know and have that information verified, I'd blow it off myself, even as the author of the original suspcion! Double-thought myself right out of what I know is happening!

Which is what a lot of people do. I honestly don't want to believe that Rep. Barton came up with his opinion all on his own. I want to believe that someone influenced him to think that way, that someone told him to act that way. Then I thought, what would be worse? That someone could make him act against the what is best for his fellow man, taking a position that IMO, flies in the face of tenets of Christianity? Or that he took some lint, thread and dust, to come up with his misguided understanding of what is correct in this tragedy?

Or, is he correct? Keeping a level head, there is something to what he indelicately spoke of. And with that, you start to see why I stopped with staring into the looking glass and avoid falling down rabbit holes. Said all this and STILL haven't spoke on what went through my mind on Memorial Day and goes through it every time I hear the ol' 'support the troop not the war' crap. Luckily, Greece has jumped off and will keep my opinion of the 'war effort' active in my mind.