I’ve got to admire Butler: his forthright viewpoint (it cost him his career) and his unswerving adherence to principle.

Perhaps someday the elitist rich in their myopic quest for power and wealth will consider this: although a frightened mob will buy your price-gouging inferior products and media-controlled spin, it is a happy, well-educated, well-paid populace that will result in a more stable economic climate and real prosperity.

I need some accommodating intra ocular lenses. Insurance doesn’t cover them, and the cost is about $2000 extra per lens, give or take. That is on top of the operation and hospital.

Hmmm. Maybe four companies with lenses still covered by patent, probably for another decade or so.

Let’s see, pegging a lens at no more than 1/10 of a gram, that would be uh, $560,000.00 per ounce. They are plastic, you know.

Does that come with a guarantee? Nope.

Conspiracy anyone?

I guess I’ll just have to find an up and coming new company with an unapproved product that has not yet been admitted to the price club and take part in a study of a new design not yet approved. I am a perfect test animal for such a study.

We see very clear evidence of this in our nomination process. It is a messy business. Voters are duped by innuendo and propaganda flying in all directions.

Recently the Clinton camp has taken heavy hits because of the torque put on some of Bill’s remarks. He was reigned in. Ferraro made a statement which was not as extreme as it was made out to be. She then stepped away from an official part in the campaign.

McCain too, has no trouble immediately distancing himself from the remarks of his own pitbulls when they seem not to have been received well by the mob.

Throughout all this, various segments of the “news” media have adjusted their stories, giving simulations of being “fair and balanced.” I have heard a great deal of argument about whose side a given network was on. It is not at all that simple.

In truth, these huge media conglomerates, now in fewer hands than ever, have their own considerations trumping principle. They sell product. Their job is not to guide you to sound reasoning or to inform you. Their job is to keep you fired up, to stir the pot, to excite you with sensationalism. Polarization is their chief method. That is what gets you to keep on mindlessly absorbing the commercials. Television is not in business to educate and inform. Only to sell product.

Obama DID get a free ride during this campaign for a long, long time. And just to give equal time, three months before he locked up the elephant nomination, all the pundits were saying McCain was dead in the water. No chance they said. Now he is the nominee, thanks, in no small part, to the media.

When Obama looked like he was ALMOST a mortal lock for the nomination, there was a distinct shift in reportage. A design to maximize the excitement and keep the fight going. They succeeded, and in so doing, may have multiplied the chances of the elephants in the general election.

Their commercial time is made more valuable, with the far cheaper costs of following campaigns and broadcasting debates and mudslinging, rather than the very expensive costs of real entertainment production. In fact, they get paid for broadcasting the mudslinging ads.

But let us go to the Donkeys for a moment. Each of the two remaining candidates has cried foul on the other with some validity. And the undecideds are really a big group. So, what do we have? On all sides, donkeys, mules, jackasses and assh0les, without a real, principled leader in sight.

And in opposition, a venerable old man, a certified and certifiable hero who willingly and courageously fought in an earlier disastrous war, who has not yet learned the lessons that war had to teach, who is ready to continue to implement the same flawed policies that have contributed so much to the quagmire we have been in for these past six years.

Now, one would think that, because of my age, I would be a natural for his consitituency. Not so. To analogize: if our present leadership is a shrub surrounded by weeds and crabgrass, this guy is a bonsai tree growing in a crevasse at the edge of a precipice.

The oddest things sometimes strike my eye. I have been wondering how on Earth we could just “lose” more than a hundred billion dollars in Iraq, in such a way that it couldn’t be tracked at all, no matter how we tried to make sense out of it with modern accounting and auditing procedures. Oh, I realize that such things as “no bid” contracts awarded to administration crony companies wastes vast public fortunes, but that nothing new.

But something I saw on a Dam Rather documentary in Iraq really struck me. A military officer was counting out STACKS
of crisp new hundred dollar bills. Stacks of fifty at a time. She was handing out each of these $5000 stacks to a neighborhood community leader in payment for the “protection” of a neighborhood. I believe each payment was for the protection of a square kilometer of land. And the community leaders? Friends. Allies who, only a short time back were shooting at us. And who will probably start shooting at us again a soon as we stop counting out continuous stacks of $100 bills. Someone pointed out that the three trillion dollars I cited as the cost of the war was just a vague projection. It is. It may be high. It may be low. But it is not imaginary. The costs of this war will continue to go on for many decades. The costs of the “cold war” were what brought down the Soviet Super State.

The “real” cost, meaning what we have currently spent and squandered, was less, maybe a fifth of that figure so far. It does not mean that those larger numbers are imaginary. Just that we will be paying for a long, long time.

None of us, including Greenspan and Bernanke can get our heads around such numbers. But we know with certainty that we are literally breaking the bank. We just saw Bear Stearns Bank break. And oddly, the illustrious leader of the free world who was quite firm that we cannot bail out people who gambled for their only chance to have a home of their own, was perfectly willing to shore up this huge bank on a moments notice. The bank that was holding the paper on more of these real estate bets than any other. And our high priests of finance say it was the right move. Go Figure. Or I guess I should say, do the math.

Meanwhile, we have lost most of our credibility in the world, both in our political clout and in our economic stability.

Another current event: One of Obamas pitbulls, General Tony McPeak, suggests that pitbull President Clinton is a demagogue at the level of a Joe McCarthy, actually using the name of that vile witch-hunting junior Senator from Wisconsin.

There was a pinch of innuendo in Clinton’s words. Nothing out of line for a political campaign. Subtle and sly. Not heavy handed at all.

Obama pretends to be taking the high road, but the truth is, this is a fight to the political death, and neither candidate is prepared to sacrifice for the pary or the nation.

For his part, Obama is indirectly playing up the fact that, if he is not the nominee, according to the polls, something like a fifth of his followers are prepared to jump parties and vote for McCain in retaliatory response. No logic to it. Just angry backlash. Obama is even tacitly encouraging it with various complementary remarks about McCain at the expense of Clinton. It would appear that at least one big splinter of the party is flirting once again with Mutual Assured Destruction.

Check out part III of this movie. If you can stomach the first two parts …
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/
prepare to have your paradigm shifted.

[quote]friendlyguy said: “Seconding Burns here. This whole article reads as if it was a culled from a conspiracy crackpot’s pet Wikipedia page, and there is very little to back up the story outside of heresay and supposition.

Damned poor. Please stick to interesting *real* historical events and scientific phenomenon.”[/quote]

“They must find it difficult… those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than the truth as authority.” -Gerald Massey