Or didn’t. Weird that it isn’t being reported in the papers here. Any mention in the MSM in the States?
If it’s true, then it must be very bad news for the hawks, because it would remove a huge amount of their reasons for hysterical war with Iran. If it’s not true, then the fact that the Israelis are saying it is would also mean some kind of policy shift away from brinksmanship, now that the election is over. Either way it seems like a story of at least a bit more weight than Beyonce’s lip synching.
Just kidding. Beyonce is way more important. Everybody knows that.
I’d tell you I believe this completely but what good would it do me? You still wouldn’t make me an offer for the bridge, would you?
And yes, the MSM is all over it. No lesser authority than Before It’s News, the best dammn news site ever, has confirmed it: it has even displaced the stories about China’s return to the gold standard and the US military helicopters strafing downtown Miami.
Personally, I don’t think you’re giving credit where it’s due. How many thousands of times have we heard of secret wars being waged against someone? Impossible even to count them all, but when, before, has anyone who’s been secretly attacked in this way ever declared a secret victory?
Off-topic, per my usual. Ran into this info from an article posted last April. http://www.visionofhumanity.org/
He credits this to lower homicide rates in the U.S., which have been cut in half since 1991, and a nearly 50% drop in rates of violent crime during the same period”
Then, the article goes on to state:
Retrospection. Now on display.
That’s what I like about this place…we all know most Americans are complete idiots but are just too polite (or vain) to say it most of the time.
On the other hand, maybe Beyonce really is as important…
Yesterday on PBS an interview was conducted with a farmer in Eastern Colorado who intended to drill one hundred acres with hemp.
Hemp: still on the prohibited substance list in the country which is the product’s biggest consumer.
The temptation to opt for technical control while losing a grip on the natural order.
Ahem.
Niner ninga: way it looks from here the natural order has got us all gripped by the short and curlies. Ain’t no way most’ve us’re gettin’ out alive, no-how.
Sorry that was supposed to say ‘ninja’
With apologies to William Carlos Williams…
An Inauguration Poem
so much depends
upon
the pink lip
syncing
glazed with cheer
fullness
between the white
chieftains
I was going to say ‘a lot maybe’, but then (skimming quickly over Greenwaldistan) I came across this.
I particularly like the Toronto Polar Bear Hunt (about 5mins in) and the Native Canadian Rhinoceros Cull’ towards the end. Not to mention ‘everyone—including landlocked Canada—needs a navy’.
OK, I know: but it is a pitiful reflection that it seems incumbent that everyone should have an opinion, even when they know absolutely nothing.
When was it so many people lost the ability to distinguish between the plausible and the implausible, between credibility and credulity, and why?
Excellent question, my dear Squirrel:
I suspect the tendency to believe errant gibberish has been around for a very long time. And, sadly, there have always been those willing to exploit the deep human need to hitch that old wagon to some shiny, gaudy, meaningless flash of light. The lights nowadays are just more varied and numerous.
When I was dating a bunch, I was always amazed by the number of women I went out with who believed – and I mean REALLY believed – the kind of nonsense one would expect to encounter in a mental hospital. These were functioning professional women, by and large, and they were absolutely fucking delusional. Men are no different, of course.
My usual reaction when I scratch the surface, getting past that thin veneer of sanity that people cultivate to be able to make their way in a rather harsh world: “For fuck’s sake, you might as just believe that a bunch of golden plates were delivered from on high to Joseph Smith…”
But I sound more contemptuous than I am. I get it. Totally. So people tell me what they believe.
Time for some sun. It’s 70 degrees here (21 Celsius).
Okay, well, I guess the great outdoors can wait another few minutes.
This is a topic I’ve been preoccupied with for a very long time. I think all the same things can be said about politics that are said about other realms of belief. I guess what gets to me most is how people are so utterly incapable of recognizing an aesthetic abomination when it is staring them right in the face. Political language, for instance, is just so freaking UGLY, and that’s what makes me so crazy.
I think I mentioned once before a prior affiliation with the Jesuits. What drew me to all that was, in retrospect, a need for some kind of coherent, meaningful aesthetic. I really do try to extend that yearning – which of course still exists – to the realm of humanity at large. An ongoing (if somewhat spasmodic) project…
Squirrel, the guy doing the interviews is well known in Canada – Rick Mercer. He caught Governor Mike Huckabee on Canada building a “National Igloo” and G. W. Bush thanking the Prime Minister of Canada – “Jean Poutine” – for his endorsement during his primary campaign in 2000. (Poutine is a fast food of fries, gravy and cheese.)
Mind you – there was one smart kid (about age 8-10) who said “hang on, Canada has provinces” when his mother was asked what she thought of the fact that “70% of Canadians could not find their home state on an unmarked map”.
The video is made from clips from a show called “This hour has 22 minutes” and the questions are full of jokes which probably are only understood by Canadians. Mercer now has his own show one of the highlights being “Rick’s Rant” – no Canadian politician or subject gets spared.
Here is one about Michael Ignatieff – who ran for the leadership of the Liberal Party
And a rant about Conservative Prime minister Stephen Harper
cheers,
gryff
I think what’s going on there is a little bit more complicated than mere ignorance (not that most of the people he shows us aren’t generally pretty ignorant about their neighbors to the north). I think what’s going on is this guy is performing a roaming variation of stage hypnotism. Which works even more effectively when his ‘volunteers’ don’t know that they are volunteering to be hypnotized. He is using his camera and sound guy, and his official looking jacket and lapel badge and microphone and haircut -along with his subjects’ genuine (and admirable) native desire to be polite to strangers, plus a worrying deference to anyone who is ‘on TV’- to basically do the same thing a hypnotist does, which is shut down the brain’s critical faculty.
It’s a hellava lot easier trick to play on most people than most people realize. We think we are always, at least while awake, acutely conscious, but all of neuroscience has and is every day proving even more confidently that consciousness itself is often merely an illusion.
It’s the rhino hunt that gives it away. Most of those people, if they were asked in a situation without the carefully constructed stress and distraction, would know very well there are no rhinos in Canada. Same goes for the coastline. Americans may not know their geography all that well, but they aren’t that ignorant. They really aren’t. This guy is clever, he doesn’t tell them they are chickens and get them to flap their wings, as a hypnotist might do, but it’s the same trick.
Or most of the time it is. And I’m sure he only manages to pull it off on a minority of his victims, too. He only gave us a glimpse of I think three people who didn’t fall for it, and even they seemed to be struggling with a fair amount of cognitive dissonance.
That said, it’s all in good fun. But not quite as strong evidence of the end of civilization as it seems.
But now I have to go answer the door there’s a guy coming round to sell me shares in a seriously important New York bridge. That is complete with rhino grates, to stop them wandering across into Manhattan in the early hours of the morning, when they tend to migrate between their nests and their feeding grounds.
Yes, I think that nails it. A lot of people, stopped in the street and suddenly finding themselves surrounded by the impedimenta of TV “news” interviews, will become disoriented and have to scramble to assemble themselves into some kind of order.
This is not to say that ignorance is not epidemic, but this kind of thing, funny as it is, does not give much of a clear window into the situation.
I’m just thankful that I don’t live on a rhinoceros migration route between the nests and feeding grounds. No way I have enough firepower to deal with something like that. I can barely keep up with the fucking chipmunks.
Bluthner:
Of course. I grant all that. I was being a bit mischievous. And I have a pretty good idea that there are probably a few thousand metres of ‘out takes’ . . .
I was always a bit surprised how willingly people would talk to me on the phone as a journo and how much they’d tell me sometimes. However, allowing for the seductiveness of the ‘five minutes of fame’ (“I’ll be on the telly tonight!”) syndrome, the professors worried me . . .
Anyway, it’s a bit cruel to clip rhinos’ wings around New York State, isn’t it? They should be allowed to fly free, I think.
I had been thinking of posting a much more recent Ricker Mercer video on gunny’s blog. A video on a topic that has caused more than a little consternation in my city.
Holiday Serving Set
On the turkey platter there is a picture of the mayor of my city – a man currently charged with:
1. Breach of public trust,
2. Fraud,
3. Uttering a forged document.
He had his first day in court about 3 weeks ago – for the RCMP to present all there evidence to the court and to his defence lawyer.
Mercer goes after anything. He was born in Newfoundland, never finished high school and is gay – always wonder how Mike Huckabee would have felt about doing an interview with Mercer if he had known that.
Now the reason I mentioned he is gay is because he has done a couple of video “rants” :
1. Bullying – It Gets Better
2. Teen Suicides
And despite the subject matter, Mercer still manages to inject some humour into his “rants”.
cheers,
gryff
So it was Richard III under the car park. And he was killed by a halberdier, by the look of it. (And probably in desperate need of a horse at the time.) And he did have a really deformed back.
Squirrel, would Shakespeare lie?
Well, his sources had been busy bending the truth a fair bit.
The simple fact that Bosworth was just an out-and-out military coup and the Tudor claim was extremely shakey (practically non-existent) could still send Henry VIII into a panic and frighten Elizabeth into executing or imprisoning the more ‘rightful’ descendants whenever they showed any signs of making too much of it. (Quite a few spent half or more of their lives in the Tower, or on a very tight leash, frequently effectively under house arrest, and others all their lives in exile.) It lasted through the reign of James i too.
The ‘Yorkists’ are still going strong, one sees from the Guardian today. (Squirrel’s always been torn: mixture of both York and Lancaster by descent and birth on my mother’s side, and brought up right on the border between them!)
Madame,
Would Shakespeare lie? Never! Unless it was a useful lie, that say, drove the story along nicely, or served a higher truth, or flattered a particularly attractive young man, or poked fun at Robert Greene…
How are those Logging Boots wearing in?
Bluthner – Alas, the Logging Boots are not insulated and so must just sit around looking pretty during this season of below freezing temps. They will kick it up come mud season.