© Sebastien Pirlet/REUTERS
The problem of trying to have a conversation with imbeciles is that they are simply incapable of understanding anything outside of their obtuse reality. They suffer from cognitive dissonance and are proud of it. In fact, the more cognitively dysfunctional, the more the imbecile is celebrated as being strong. Imbeciles cannot be enlightened; their ignorant and boorish way of looking at the world is impervious to any different, even more correct perspective. Indeed, they have a visceral aversion to correction, which only retrenches their imbecility all the more.
The problem in dealing with vassals is that they are powerless to change course - even if they have a residual ability to think independently and to recognise an alternative perspective as being more correct, or at least reasonable.
Thus we have the dilemma facing Russia in its dealings with Washington and its European allies over the Ukraine conflict.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking in Munich last weekend, deplored the lack of European independence in averting Washington's systematic vandalism of the international order. Lavrov was scoffed at for daring to speak the truth and more so because he used logic and historical evidence to support his argument.
The imbecilic Americans substitute axioms and accusations for rational dialogue. They are guided by their own self-serving propaganda and are deluded by every word of it. And proud of it! God bless America!
US President Barack Obama, who is supposed to be one of the most thoughtful American politicians, evidently can't think beyond the uniform straitjacket narrative that posits, without a scintilla of evidence, that the conflict in Ukraine as "all Russia's fault".
Speaking with German Chancellor by his side at the White House this week, Obama said that he was considering sending lethal weapons to the Kiev regime "to help Ukraine bolster its defenses in the face of separatist aggression". Obama accused Russia of fueling the conflict and of trying to violate Ukraine's territorial integrity "down the barrel of a gun".
Reality check. Ethnic Russians are being killed in their homes, basements, schools and streets, by the Western-backed Kiev regime, which launched a gratuitous war on eastern Ukraine ten months ago, resulting in over 5,500 dead and more than a million people displaced - and yet Obama condemns the violence as "separatist aggression" and wants to send more deadly weapons to the offenders.
From Obama on down the political ladder, it only gets worse. The Vice President Joe Biden told the security conference in Munich last weekend that "Ukrainians have the right to defend themselves" and so the US should send military support to ward off "Russian aggression".
So, Mr Biden, what about the right of ethnic Russian Ukrainians defending themselves? Are they debarred from doing so? Are they not Ukrainians? Or maybe because they are ethnic Russians that makes them inferior in your view?
America's top diplomat John Kerry, a supposedly urbane, multilingual cosmopolitan, reiterates the same baseless, brainless accusations against Russia, claiming the latter to be the "biggest threat to Ukraine". Kerry also wants to send weapons to Ukraine to teach Russia a lesson.
Ditto Ashton Carter, the incoming Defense Secretary. Ditto Michel Flournoy, who is tipped to be Defense Secretary if Hillary Clinton wins the 2016 presidency. Ditto Bobby Jindal who is a hot contender for the Republican presidential candidacy. Ditto Republican foreign policy chief Bob Corker. Ditto the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey. Ditto the members of America's foreign policy establishment at the Brookings Institute and Atlantic Council. Ditto the editorial boards of America's top media corporations, including the New York Times and Washington Post. All of them unblinkingly repeat the mantra that the Ukraine conflict is due to Russian aggression and that arming the Kiev regime is a swell idea for peace. All of them regurgitate a corny travesty of history which paints Russian President Vladimir Putin as "a mid-20th Century dictator" in the same "expansionist" vein as Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. (Without a whit of understanding that mid-20th Century fascism was fomented as a covert policy of Western capitalist powers to attack the Soviet Union, and resulted in 30 million dead Russians. A policy that continues today in the form of US support for the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev as a destabilizing force towards Russia.)
The scary thing about American imbeciles is that they don't have an inkling that they might be brainwashed. They are Orwellian clones who believe that war is peace, slavery is freedom, and truth is whatever you are told it is.
American politicians attending the Munich Security Conference derided efforts by Germany's Merkel and French President Francois Hollande to engage Putin in political dialogue over the Ukraine crisis as "bullshit".
The three leaders are proposing to follow up lengthy discussions held in Moscow last weekend with a further meeting in Minsk, the Belarus capital, this week. It's far from certain that Putin, Merkel and Hollande can achieve a breakthrough to get the Kiev regime to sit down and talk with the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. The uncouth Americans are certainly trying their best to scupper dialogue before it is even given a chance to progress.
In contrast to the gung-ho Americans, there is a new consensus among the Europeans that pouring more weapons into Ukraine is no solution, indeed is to be avoided, and that the separatists have reasonable grounds for political autonomy deserving a respectful hearing.
The Europeans, at least publicly, may still adopt the hoary narrative that Russia is destabilizing Ukraine covertly with its troops or military support for the separatists. Moscow flatly denies those claims. But at least the Europeans seem to have enough intellectual subtlety to realize that maximalist finger-pointing against Putin is counterproductive and that there might be more than one side to the story.
To her credit, Angela Merkel has stood firm in her opposition to American calls for increasing military involvement in Ukraine. While in Washington this week, she categorically ruled out supporting the idea of sending more weapons into Ukraine. Merkel's opposition to US proposals has been denounced by leading Republican Senators as "appeasement" of Putin, with asinine analogies to Chamberlain and Hitler at the 1938 Munich conference.
Dealing with American imbeciles is thus impossible. They inhabit a different mental world from most other people. Their world is formed by ahistorical propaganda and a boorish attitude that makes dialogue, reciprocation, or socratic elucidation a dim prospect. Their arrogance and ignorant conceit are obstacles to genuine communication and understanding. It's all Putin's fault; it's all due to those morose Russian hordes; it's the evil Soviet empire making a comeback. A US-backed regime-change illegal operation in Kiev against an elected government? A US-backed regime waging war on ethnic Russian people in eastern Ukraine? Are you nuts, you Putin-pussy-apologist?
How can you deal with such people? You can't.
However, the additional problem is that the Europeans are not free to really act on their incipient independent thoughts. It is clear that Merkel and Hollande, and many other European leaders, realize that US plans to flood Ukraine with even more lethal weapons is a woeful idea that potentially could spark World War III. It is clear that many Europeans think US-led sanctions against Russia are not only counterproductive, but actually an unreasonable, hostile policy that is hurting European workers, farmers and economies as much as it is Russia's.
The problematic fact is that European states are vassals of America. They are not free to act out of line from Washington's dictate, no matter how ludicrous is the latter. Germany is considered the powerhouse of Europe and the fourth largest economy in the world. Yet, as German political analyst Christof Lehmann reminds us, Germany has never had genuine political independence since the end of the Second World War. It does not have a constitution befitting a modern state, and it continues to be occupied by military forces belonging to the "victorious" American and British allies. "Germany is a de facto colony of the US", says Lehmann. "At any time, under the postwar basic law, American troops can take over the government of Germany, which technically and legally is an occupied state, a vassal state".
The American NSA spying on Chancellor Merkel revealed in 2013 by Edward Snowden is a case in point. More telling is how Merkel did not respond to that gross infringement of German "sovereignty" with the political force that that American violation merited. She meekly accepted the intrusion as a condition of American postwar hegemony.
Lehmann points out how any past moves by Germany to create an independent foreign policy, and one in particular that involves rapprochement with Russia, have been serially vetoed by the US and its British ally. "We saw that under Chancellors Willy Brandt and Gerhard Schroeder, their efforts at adopting a more friendly relation with Russia were sabotaged at every step by Washington and London", says Lehmann.
That is why Merkel deserves much credit for making her bold stand this week against American militarism in Ukraine. Her dissent is highly significant of a potential cleavage in US-European relations. What she is doing is challenging a fundamental red line in Washington: namely, that European states, and Germany especially, cannot, must not, dare to question American hegemony and its longterm policy of hostility towards Russia.
Merkel and Hollande may be finally getting the message from the millions of ordinary EU citizens who deeply object to American warmongering towards Russia at Europe's expense. But given the tradition of European vassalage to the imbecilic Americans, the chances of a positive breakthrough for peaceful relations remain elusive. European leadership is still a captive of Washington's clutches. But the disgusted European masses might just be forcing a break in the imbecilic bonds.
. . . we have this:
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Masters of Parallel Universes -
Club Orlov [Link]
Much as we may dislike the fact, the results from quantum physics are unequivocal: parallel universes do exist. Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead, at the same time, while it exists as a probability distribution, which is resolved into either a live cat or a dead one by the act of opening the box and observing it. But until the observation is made, both parallel universes can be said to exist, and there is no way for us to know which one of them we inhabit.
Quantum effects dominate in the micro realm of subatomic particles. For instance, the laptop on which I am typing this contains millions of transistors which are created by implanting ions into silicon substrates to create patches with built-in electric fields and interconnecting these patches with etched aluminum wiring. Each transistor relies on the phenomenon of quantum tunneling: while in normal physics it is impossible for an electron to find itself on the wrong side of a built-in electric field, in quantum physics the electron is a probability distribution, not a particle, and quantum tunneling works reliably enough to support the entire electronics industry. But if you scale your circuit up, the chance of a pickup truck successfully “tunneling” through a brick wall becomes too minuscule to be of practical interest. It is still possible, but it would take anywhere between right now and several lifetimes of the universe hence to observe that result.
Oddly enough, such quantum effects are quite normal to observe within the political space. Here the physical objects involved are far too large to give rise to the parallel universes of quantum physics, but the narratives they give rise to are not. This is because the narratives are a matter of perception, and there can be historical periods, such as the present one, when the peephole through which the political establishment and the mainstream media allow us to see the world becomes so tiny that it becomes a toss-up as to whether or not any given photon will manage to find its way through it.
Here, reality becomes fractured into parallel universes as soon as we make the realization that we are being lied to. Were there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? No, and the vial of white powder which Colin Powell menacingly held up at the UN was fake. The Iraqi mobile biological weapons factories did not exist. Was Al Qaeda active in Iraq prior to the US invasion? No, we know that it wasn't. These lies are now known to be factual—uncontested, commonplace knowledge. Next: do we make the arbitrary leap of judgment and declare that that's all the lies we will have ever been told, or do we admit the possibility that this is only the tip of an iceberg of lies, that lying is a modus operandi for the operatives behind them? If we do, then, to be conservative, for every official narrative we must construct one or more unofficial but also plausible (and perhaps much more plausible) narratives. Each of them constitutes a parallel universe, and we can't know which of them we inhabit until some happy accident—a leak, an investigation, a damning bit of physical evidence, or an outright admission of complicity or guilt—collapses the probability waveform, destroying all the parallel universes but the real one.
Many people have been conditioned to think that this is the realm of “conspiracy theory.” Unfortunately, the term doesn't apply. First, the existence of a conspiracy has to be accepted as a given: nobody ever perpetrates a heinous act of murder, mayhem and destruction by telegraphing their intentions ahead of time. If they do, the event usually doesn't go off as planned, and in such cases it is usually announced that a conspiracy has been uncovered and a plot thwarted. Thus, the use of the term “conspiracy” is gratuitous; it goes without saying that there always is one. Secondly, the term “theory” is gratuitous as well: a theory is a mental construct designed to account for a given set of observations. But what if all you do is point out the observations (which are in the public domain, there for all to see) and make no effort whatsoever to account for them?
However, there is one theory that accounts for a very large class of such observations, and it is so simple that it is often overlooked. It is this: that the government and the official sources of information are normally lying. We already know that they have lied in the past (Iraqi WMD and al Qaeda in Iraq are two particularly well-known examples, but there are many others). The question then becomes, When did they stop lying (if in fact they did)? Was there a conspiracy to stop lying? There would have to have been one, because we certainly haven't heard any statements made by public officials to the effect that “We will now stop lying.” Or did they spontaneously all stop lying at the same time? The probability of that happening is pretty low; it could, of course happen—any time between right now and several lifetimes of the universe hence. So if you believe that they have indeed stopped lying, then I suppose that makes you a conspiracy theorist par excellence. The conservative assumption is that they are still lying.
There are lots of people who have been working to keep these parallel universes alive in one form or another, by collecting and collating bits of information, by offering partial explanations, by evaluating the official explanations as to their logical consistency. They have been doing this in spite of being ostracized as “conspiracy theorists.” To be fair, they have sometimes been glorified as “truth-seekers” or “truth-tellers” and that must provide an ego boost for some people. But really what they have been doing is generating, and sustaining, alternative narratives and keeping parallel universes alive, so that at some time in the future we will find out which one we have been inhabiting all along.
Some people make the mistake of refusing to listen and to explore these parallel universes, because it makes them ill at ease not to know which one they happen to inhabit. But if you accept the extreme likelihood that the official narrative is a bunch of lies concocted to hide the truth, then there is some comfort to be gained in at least knowing something that might not be a lie. Once the initial hesitation is past, it becomes a fun, if somewhat macabre, hobby, because puzzling evidence jumps out at you just about everywhere you care to look.
An important precondition of being able to interpret the result of Schrödinger's thought experiment is being able to figure out what a cat looks like. Here is a specific example. Currently, there are two parallel universes. In one, Russian troops have invaded Ukraine. In the other, Russian troops did not invade Ukraine. What makes this difficult is understanding what is meant by Russian troops. There are Russians in eastern Ukraine. There are troops in eastern Ukraine. A lot of the troops in eastern Ukraine are in fact Russian. But there are no Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. Get it? To qualify as actual Russian troops, they would have to have enlisted in the Russian military, and would have to take their orders through the Russian chain of command. And these ones obviously don't. There is a strong political connection with Russia, but the military one is tenuous. The latest “proof” of Russian invasion, offered by the Ukraine's president Poroshenko in Munich, consists of some Russian internal passports and military service certificates found in eastern Ukraine. Funny thing is, when you are inducted into the Russian military, you have to surrender those civilian documents. Sometimes a perfectly viable, though quite short-lived parallel universe can be concocted by twisting things in small ways.
But most of the time a parallel universe pops into existence when things get twisted in impressively brazen and shameless ways. A lot of people start with 9/11. The twin towers collapsed because they were hit by jet airliners because, you see, kerosene melts steel. Was it special, magic kerosene, and were the buildings were made of special, magic steel? Maybe that's why since then skyscrapers can't be insured against fire any more. Previously it was thought that skyscrapers can't collapse due to fire because they are made of steel, and a hydrocarbon-based fire isn't hot enough to melt it. What fools those civil engineers must have been! Turns out, all you need is some kerosene!
Then the two skyscrapers spontaneously collapsed into their own footprints—all on their own—and so the entire industry of demolition experts (whose job is to mine tall buildings with explosive charges and detonate them under computer control to keep the buildings from toppling over) has since been retired. Skyscrapers are now known to pose a huge fire hazard due to the melty steel of which they are made, and they must all be demolished right away. But don't hire any demolition experts, since we now know that their entire industry was a hoax, because skyscrapers collapse into their own footprints all by themselves. Just take some retired old jets from American Airlines (they have plenty of them) and fly them into the skyscrapers unmanned using remote fly by wire technology.
Another “plane” hit the Pentagon. That plane had no engines, since none were found (but in spite of this it not only flew, but executed a pirouette worthy of a jet fighter). Also, it had no seats (the passengers must have mimed sitting down and buckling up) and no luggage (they must have traveled really light). The perpetrators' identity was found out thanks to a passport found at the World Trade Center site. It was a magic passport; unlike the steel girders of the twin towers, a kerosene fireball could not even singe it.
Fast-forward to the latest staged atrocity: the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. The perpetrators were clearly well-trained, disciplined commandos, who executed a flawless mission, making it likely that they were special service people of some country or other. But then one of them magically forgot his ID in the getaway car—just like that passport magically found in the wreckage of 9/11. (Do commandos take their civilian IDs with them when they go on a secret mission?) And then the alleged driver of the getaway car surrendered to the police, saying that he has an ironclad alibi. The fact that he surrendered was reported in the media; the reason why he surrendered was not. And then the person charged with conducting the investigation killed himself while working on his report. Did his report agree with the official narrative?
Reminds me of another staged atrocity: the Boston Marathon bombing. The very large number of special ops people milling about the scene before the firecrackers went off has been noted, but clearly they had nothing to do with it—they were just enjoying their day off, all dressed the same. The two patsies who were blamed for it—the Tsarnaev brothers—were well-known to the FBI. After the firecrackers went off, a crew of specialists immediately descended on the scene, with actors posing as victims and fake blood being tossed about. Video evidence shows them taking a long time to stage photo-ops of the supposed atrocity.
The ensuing media campaign with “Boston Strong” stickers was identical to the “Je suis Carlie” campaign following the Charlie Hebdo event. And as with the Charlie Hebdo event, there was a concerted effort to kill the alleged perpetrators before they could answer any questions in ways that might contradict the official story. In the case of the Tsarnaev brothers, the attempt to kill the younger one failed. The boat in which he was hiding, scared and unarmed, was riddled with bullets, and after he surrendered an unexplained emergency tracheotomy was performed on him, but he is still alive, and defiant of the efforts to frame him.
But the most interesting part came after the event, when Boston was placed under military occupation, with residents forced to stay inside their houses for fear of being machine-gunned down by troops rumbling down the streets in APCs, supposedly in pursuit of a couple of kids. The real rationale for the event was to impose martial law on Boston (the cradle of the American Revolution) on Patriot's Day (which commemorates a signal event that started it). If you read into these events just a little bit, you just might come to the conclusion that the US is no longer a constitutional democracy but a military dictatorship and a police state ruled by an oligarchy that likes to stage gruesome special events to show just how far above the law it really is.
Or take the Malaysian Airlines MH-17 shoot-down over Eastern Ukraine last year. Again, the media campaign was clearly set up before the event. The clairvoyant western observers know who to blame: it was the “Russian-backed rebels” and they used a weapons system provided by Russia. This was repeated endlessly, using a technique used in advertising: “proof by repetition.” Never mind that the rebels had no ability to shoot down that airliner. But the truth has been slowly dribbling out. Flight MH-17 was shot down by a Ukrainian jet fighter from Dnepropetrovsk using an air-to-air missile. (The rebels had no aircraft; why was it armed with one?) The name of the pilot is now known. The person who identified him is in Russia, in witness protection. Russian investigators are pursuing leads, and there is a good chance that we will eventually find out who issued the criminal orders.
I could keep going in this vein for a really long time, piling bits of puzzling evidence upon other bits of puzzling evidence. But the whole point of this exercise is to try to get across to you of one very simple, basic point: if you insist on ignoring all the obvious lies you've been told for years and years and dismiss everything but the official narrative as a “conspiracy theory,” then that makes you something of a mind control victim. And I don't want you to be a victim.
One last thing: if you find yourself living in a Schrödinger box, do what you can to avoid ending up dead. I'll leave it up to you to work out out the details of that, but the hint is simple: your likelihood of ending up dead is higher if you believe in lies. Don't be a dead cat."