Regarding Dwayne's call to hack the system: While there is great joy to be had in hacking the hackable, a pivot for my own understanding of the world in the past several years is the inscrutable power of studied ignorance in the face of concrete damage to you and yours, the Heartfieldian "nyah, nyah, I don't believe you and you can't make me." I find here less of a system to understand and manipulate as much as a genius to exploit, like Rove's pulling a POTUS out of a beer helmet.
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Yes, this is a huge problem and evidence of a profound degeneracy (not unlike the difference between say, the reign of Augustus and that of Nero - one, the chief engineer of a complex system, the other, an addled, yet clever manipulator of his predecessor's creation).
But we can take heart - after a fashion - from Richard Feynman's stern warning to powerful lazy-asses everywhere. Concluding his contribution to the Rogers Commission's (wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission) inquiry into the causes of Challenger's destruction Feynman wrote:
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
Feynman was referring to the fatal decision of NASA administrators to ignore warnings about the safe operational temperature of a key space shuttle component - the o ring - in favor of the PR value of launching on time and on budget with a telegenic, magazine cover gracing teacher on board.
Nature cannot be fooled.
Everyone should fall madly in love with those words.
You can drive for awhile without servicing your brakes but erosion and entropy are relentless mofos - your brakes will eventually fail; probably when you need them most. You can pretend that the germ theory of disease is, as some say, "just a theory" but spend some time using your shit water for tooth brushing and marvel at the spectacular, 12th century style results. You can nyah, nyah at climate change but the carbon cycle will continue its churn towards a higher state of instability.
Sooner or later, nature overwhelms all bullshit. Trouble is, in many cases this forced revelation comes too late for effective triage.
We usually fix our gaze on the obviously spectacular damage done thus far during the Bush years: the mass death in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Gitmo gulag, the "extraordinary renditions" and various authoritarian maneuvers. But as horrific and long consequenced as those are there is another type of damage: the elevation - perhaps on an unprecedented scale (Older list members! Feel free to correct me on this.) of the unreal over the real.
Viewed in a distorting mirror, it's possible to believe that the Department of Homeland Security is, among other things, a counter-terror organization. Seen in sharp focus, its true purpose is clearly visible; we understand it to be a vast harassment apparatus, roughly veiled by a thin tissue of security theater.
It was created, whole cloth, as a manifestation of the bullshit idea that the US faced an existential threat - bullshit is in its DNA and so, bullshit is practically all it and its parasitic offspring can do (What is the TSA? Is it an airport security agency or a simulation of security?)
Rove successfully depicted Bush - a sub par person with sub par ideas - as a towering giant: a Napoleon, a Churchill, and a Charlemagne in a John Wayne package. This fantasy met the needs of a large subset of the population - confused (mostly) white people scrambling to understand a world that doesn't fit their categories. That, and an assist from the Supreme Court produced Team Bush's first presidential electoral victory in 2000. The second victory, in 2004, was the payoff of four years of bullshit perceptual engineering.
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Why is this important?
Many reasons of course, but the one that's nearest to my heart is perhaps the most critical. Right now, we need minimum illusion clouding our decision making. Is climate change real? Let's not waste time asking clever writers with agendas or talking head lobbyists - prime movers of the bullshitocracy. We have to go to scientists who spend time on the ocean and in the forests and in bracing polar wind, measuring, thinking and projecting based upon the best available information and understanding.
But the bullshitocracy has no time for facts when they're inconvenient, preferring to send compromised space shuttles to their fiery doom, armies on the march in search of nonexistent arsenals, mothers milk into trash bins because someone once made a movie about "binary explosives" disguised as baby food. Instead of action, there are speeches; instead of hard headed analysis of our situation there's wishful thinking - some Utopian, some dystopian.
As Chomsky once remarked, it may indeed turn out that intelligence is not a successful adapation, that the very things most of us consider to be our crowning glories - consciousness and intellect - bring with them so much baggage in the form of a love a bullshittery (perhaps an extension, in some perverse way, of our love of good stories) that we fail to do what we need to do.
Hopefully, this isn't the case.
.d.
-- Nullpunktsenergie?
...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/