The Rooskies Are Out to Get Us!

I think it is kinda silly to think the government doesn't have and keep secrets.

Who knows what secrets are kept if they are good at keeping them?

There are many things the public should not know.

Bizarre things?

An shallow bit of navel gazing?

Also, I should add that Americans think lots of bizarre things. A poll from the late '90s showed that 65% of Americans think an alien spaceship crashed at Roswell in 1947. Further, 80% think the government is hiding knowledge of space aliens.

You up to the task of provin' 'em wrong, Jonathan?

Riiiiiight. Its silly to think that this universe with something like 10 billion galaxies (and still counting!) each possessing 1-3 trillion stars (thats a ten followed by 21 zeros) wouldn't have at least one other planet where intelligent life formed that over a long period of time developed mathematics, monumental architecture, agricultural techniques, manned flight, radio astronomy, etc yet its not silly to think that some wizened old guy with a long beard and sandals is sitting somehwere up in the skies watching over us, demanding adoration and worship and by some accounts predestines people to an eternity of suffereing and tormet for doing absolutely nothing. Yeah, thats not silly at all.

um, can we please get beyond this kind of kneejerk dismissal of aliens and those who believe it's extremely probable that there is other life out there? it's pretty offensive and presumptuous, especially since a mojo special report that otherwise explains some of the most extraordinary sightings and other pieces of evidence, etc., does not seem to be forthcoming.

What can we say to this? Are these the choices as to why one might view with fear Russia’s invasion of Georgia? I must say that for me the reasons extend beyond this list, though this certainly isn’t a poor list—Russia cannot be analyzed in relation to the US but must be seen within the context of the last 300 years and here one sees their continuous use of military force to expand their sphere of influence—when we then look at the US and its pro-torture, pro police state government, and how US foreign policy help to Iraq and Afghanistan has a greater emphasis on the building of prisons than anything else, then there are grounds to believe that a war is a real possibility—via the mentality of the Guns of August. Rest assured that Russia is eyeing closely just how the US responds and whether the US moves their troops or beefs up their presents of aircraft carriers or tridents in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just as they are eyeing the EU to see how they react militarily. When you consider that Lithuania or Estonia or Latvia also have pockets of Russians—will these countries be next? In fact the use of Russian enclaves is a method to justify Russian hostility against any former Soviet Union member. Perhaps Poland will need to be “taught a lesson” or hell why not the Czechs? For the “Rooskies” teaching lessons to Georgia, White Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Kazakhstan, Chechnya, Azerbaijan and beyond is a long standing tradition and so was the teaching of Czechs and Hungarians and Poles during the cold war—they taught these Warsaw Pact nations the meaning of their weakness by stealing their wealth so as to maintain the lie of the “revolution” and its “success”. Russia just 8 years ago was in no position to flex its muscles but thanks to the Bush administration they have become rich—apparently the Bush administration views weakening American Power by conducting wars that bankrupt the nation but increase Russian Power by making them rich is part of American national security. When Russia has said that they will use military force to stop the deployment of US rockets in Poland—I think they mean it. Don’t get me wrong, I admire Russia, especially their art, their literature, their culture, etc. and I could say a hell of a lot more positive about Putin than Bush but I don’t like Russian militarism—it lowers them as a people, just as it lowers us.) Obviously the author here does not consider this invasion as alarming—but it strikes me as naive ... . but to be more defuse and to clown around one could always view fear from a more “ontological” perspective.

We all know that in the 20th century the largest and most deadly wars in human history were waged—the Cold War was “chilly” (it was bloody as well), while WWI and WWII were exceptionally “bloody”. But the mentality of Cold War or World War is not separated by “McCarthy” or “Stalin” or the “isms” of their names (McCarthyism or Stalinism) but rather by the realities from which McCarthy and Stalin were born into—that of “Empire”, “Colonialism”, “Imperialism”—take your pick, for we claim that we are “free”. It is the lie and abuse of power that is contained in the belief that powerful states are entitled to impose their will on those who are weaker (perhaps the most defining measure of good and evil is simply good means being more powerful and bad means being weaker)—this is the abortion and abomination of the history of power.

Powers or the concept of “great powers” is essentially ancient, perhaps it is a “genetic” trait, that can aid in the survival of the species but that can just as well account for the extinction of the species too—we carry the later potential within our grasp and it demands nothing more than a suicidal nut-job pushing the red button and all life vanishes; Thus the quest to create a sense of rule in the world which is not necessarily “homogeneous” like that cosmological assumption that the Universe is everywhere alike, but one in which the use of power is non-militaristic might actually be a goal for world rule—that we might accept certain limitations of national power because the consequence of war is too ugly (the idea of a global conscientiousness would mean that such means of dealing with life are recognized as not being solved by guns, but it also means that it will not be resolved by a homogeneous religion—people who adhered to some form of Christianity found through centuries of war that religion would not solve the problems of how to live life—you will not be closer to God because you put on a black clown uniform with a white collar and memorize the bible and demand that people follow the “word” of God—as though God uses words—God is more akin to Kafka's short reflection upon the meaning of the Sirens in Homer's The Odyssey, where the pouring of wax into the ears of Ulysses crew was said to protect them from the crazed music of the Sirens—Kafka argues that it was to protect them from the sheer silence—the utter nothingness of pure and absolute silence and the fear that such silence creates because of its affinity with death;

Still if the world will not be managed by sucking up to holy liars (for in antiquity the old adage was, “Bards tell many a lie” and who were these ancient bards—if not the creators of religion) or sucking up to men that suffer from a deranged megalomania—men like Bush or Putin (men who see the meaning of their life in terms of their legacy) and thus it means that the people and the problems they face will not be resolved by “ideologies” either.

Yet we seem to admit that “government” or “the rule of law” is somehow necessary—in the sense of local autonomy, rule must be in place or else we have chaos. By looking at the effect of corporations we can again see that corporation offer no solution to the world and its problems in terms of a way in which the world will govern itself, especially in a way in which the integrity of human life will be respected—because corporation have no respect for life, for them the best employee is what amounts to a slave—hence the love of the private prison and their religion is simply that the object of life is to maximize their profits.

It seems then that we do not have a solution unless we as individuals understand how it is that we can govern ourselves—it requires at a minimum a respect for one's own life and that means a sense of self respect that isn't surrendered to the “faith” that some other dude will resolve the meaning of our life for us. So perhaps one must be “theological” but without god—or as Meister Eckhart put it—you must know God by not knowing God—theological in the sense that you not sell yourself short, but equally important is to not sell others short either.
It is easiest to sell others short when we are a group because as a group our purpose as a group makes our actions acceptable to the group—our conformity to the group, but with this conformity our potentially insane acts also have a sense of “community” to them and therefore are legal within the group—thus if our group is a nation and the “leader” of our nation says, “those dudes over there are a bunch a bad motherfu#kers and they need their a$$es kicked” then the group mind says it's okay to go and kill those motherfu#kers because the head Honcho says it is good—that it is Patriotic, that it offers us national security or some such nonsense. The correct reaction would be to say no—because the problem lies in the rather fuc#ed up mind of the head honcho—to have the collective will to see this falsity in leadership would be a movement towards “freedom” and the failure to see it a form of imprisonment and slavery of the soul. We remain within the domain of the imprisoned and are but slaves to a vegetable authority.

The added hitch to the human predicament game is that this sense of “self respect” is not happening because the road to the optimal payoff matrix is compromised by the social action that society is built upon, hence the majority of people live under the spell of their own insignificance in relation to alleged greats. (Those who are glorified as important or even more bizarre are those fables concerning nonexistent beings that are propped up as “holy perfection” and to dare to challenge this hypocrisy is to play with a lethal form of blasphemy—people will do what authority commands and consequently each act we take must be understood through the guise of this built in sense of obedience to authority—not McCarthyism or Islam or Stalinism or Judaism or Communism or Fascism or Christianity or whatever the doctrine that motivates our actions and our “goodness” because we are slaves to obedience—yet what is this obedience if it is not fear—but we do not recognize our fear because we see it as our “national” right or as our religion—we are following God's will. But God is fear, Authority is fear! Nationalism is fear. In relation to fear we are for the most part blind because we have been conditioned by it and thus what brings to the foreground fear is the breaking of taboo. In here lie the roots of “terrorism” because if we are to win a war against terrorism it would mean understanding what it is—but we do not know who we are and thus “terrorism” has its roots in a personal ignorance.

Fear strikes me as being constitutional to the make up of our being. We are in a perpetual state of anxiety—because all life leads to a guaranteed death and this predicament is something that is always placed out in the future (it’s what makes fear something that is proximate in a sense of space and time)—we are from the instant of our conception on our way to the grave and death is built into to the constitution of our being as the ultimate fear—because the mind quickly deduces that it is born into a terminal state of being that will of necessity end. That ending and the finiteness of our existence are fear. The question though is how we use this fear—if we surrender to it then we fall pray to being inconsequential—in the sense that our existence is not of much importance (I guess a sort of “bad faith” or general nihilism—where “war” isn’t a concern until it cannot be escaped—but then it is too late) Our obedience to social conformity is strong because it functions to ease the impact of the fear since we attempt to escape the reality of our own confrontation with our own death by being subsumed into the collective will (we sell our responsibility to our individual self—hence this sense of original sin. We surrender the reality of our predicament to the herd because the herd has surrendered its fate to a fiction called the beyond. That beyond is a psychological need to be free of the fact that we are indeed finite (merely temporary) and that our presence is inexplicable—but it is because our presence is inexplicable that the world exists in a state of wonder and curiosity.