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Are They Lying, Or Just Stupid?
Submitted by James H. Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
It’s not always easy to define what exactly is wrong with America, but what ever it is, it’s huge.
— Roel Ilargi Meijer, The Automatic Earth.com
Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we’re having all this trouble with our Republic.
— Tom McGuane, Ninety-Two in the Shade
Despite its Valley Girl origins, the simple term clueless turns out to be the most accurate descriptor for America’s degenerate zeitgeist. Nobody gets it — the “it” being a rather hefty bundle of issues ranging from our energy bind to the official mismanagement of money, the manipulation of markets, the crimes in banking, the blundering foreign misadventures, the revolving door corruption in governance, the abandonment of the rule-of-law, the ominous wind-down of the Happy Motoring fiasco and the related tragedy of obsolete suburbia, the contemptuous disregard for the futures of young people, the immersive Kardashian celebrity twerking sleaze, the downward spiral of the floundering classes into pizza and Pepsi induced obesity, methedrine psychosis, and tattooed savagery, and the thick patina of public relations dishonesty that coats all of it like some toxic bacterial overgrowth. The dwindling life of our nation, where anything goes and nothing matters.
It’s not just the individual cluelessness of ordinary people leading lives too frantic for a moment’s reflection about anything, but the appalling institutional cluelessness of enterprises where you’d think combined intellects might tend toward a more faithful view of reality. But these days all we get is a low-order of wishful and clownish group-think, such as this item from today’s New York Times discussing a proposed reversal of Gazprom pipelines along the Ukraine / Slovakian frontier as the solution to the Kiev government’s fuel problem:
Nearly all the gas Washington and Brussels would like to get moving into Ukraine from Europe originally came from Russia, which pumps gas westward across Ukraine, into Slovakia and then on to customers in Germany and elsewhere. Once the gas is sold, however, Gazprom ceases to be its owner and loses its power to set the terms of its sale.
Get that? To avoid depending on Russian gas, they’re going to buy Russian gas from sources other than Russia. What New York Times editor can read this story without spraying her video display with coffee? What genius in John Kerry’s “Haircut-in-Search-of-a-Brain” State Department dreamed up this dodge? Who would think that you could improve a Chinese fire drill by tacking on a Polish blanket trick (i.e. trying to make your blanket longer by cutting a foot from the top and sewing it onto the bottom).
The only conclusion the casual observer can come to is, to put it mildly, these institutions have gone completely meshugga. Since I follow the behavior of these organizations, I know that this is not an isolated example. For the State Department, the entire gambit in Ukraine has been a chain of obvious bungles and miscalculations, starting with our sponsored overthrow of the original elected Kiev government, and the absurd presumption that Russia had no legitimate interest in that region’s stability to the strategy of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot financial sanctions. The New York Times (once America’s “Newspaper of Record”), is now a completely unreliable conduit for un-parsed White House backgrounder propaganda and raw State Department spin, with an overlay of editorial PMS brain fog.
Another humdinger on a somewhat different issue caught my attention the other day in the formerly eminent, now degenerate journal Foreign Affairs (May / June 2014): The United States of Gas, by Robert Hefner III . This idiotic article in the current issue hits on all the usual wishful thinking delusions du jour concerning this country’s energy prospects, namely: due to fracking in shale deposits we’ve entered an energy-and-manufacturing renaissance, we’re soon-to-be the premier energy exporter to the world, and US “consumers” (i.e. citizens) can be assured of driving to WalMart forever — in other words, all economic problems solved. These idiots (editors and fact-checkers included) must get all their information straight out of the Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) PR handouts. CERA, of course, is the official public relations shop of the oil and gas industry.
It’s one thing that this article is patently misleading. What’s worse is the complete absence of any understanding of the fundamental dynamic between the high cost of unconventional oil and gas and its effect on capital formation. In other words, the capital investment for continued future drilling will simply not exist. What a surprise that will be to the people who run this land.
There comes a point in the destiny of a failing nation when official lying is no longer distinct from official stupidity. We’ve crossed that boundary in the USA. It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.
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It's MESHUGENAH.......... not messhugah
Just FYI my NY-native wife pronounces it both ways. One might be a contraction. Though it's just as likely she's forgotten how to be Jewish because that river didn't run too deep.
One is noun, the other adjective?
and this is meshuggah:
http://youtu.be/weiXdYGuawY?t=1m14s
Yes.
The Harbinger
"Tattooed savagery" Welcome to the Thunder Dome.
When I was coming up, only sleazy people and sailors had tattoos. Now people have graphic sexual tattoos out for public view at all times.
Maybe we need an arena to thin the herd?
A society works best when everyone tells the truth. When two men shake each other's hand and execute on the agreed terms, economic efficiency is maximized. Any dumb to smart person can improve their position in a truth-telling society if they tell people what the people want to hear by telling a good story full of smart focused lies. This liar can sell ABS trash with triple A rated lies to all the gullible people that think people, bank institutions and regulatory agencies are honest moral and honorable brokers. Over time, everyone gets burned, everyone gets cynical and everyone LIES. (Note: I could make the same type of statement about the USA Judicial system that acts more like a legal mafia than the blind lady of justice myth.) Once everyone lies, the society collapses.
First goes trust. Then goes faith. Then goes civility.... then what?
Then comes Jreb in the baby carriage.
You're a poet. Did you know it?
then goes virginity
Patience is like virgnity. It only takes one prick and it's gone.
Humanity lost something important when it gave up on the chivalric ideals of knighthood.
I don't grok your point about capital formation for fracking, what I do get is that we're not doing half of it we might because of green opposition. And, there are some technical questions about how durable that production might be.
If you were serious when you mentioned that you don't grok it, read this gal and you can start with this work:
http://ourfiniteworld.com/oil-supply-limits-and-the-continuing-financial...
There is a lot of supporting discussion at that site, most of it her. She is very methodical, more like a lawyer than anything. If you really are interested in getting it just read her stuff.
I used to think we were going to burn every ton of fossil fuel on the planet come hell or high water (literally). These days, not so much, and it's due to Gail's very well-reasoned argument.
EDIT: I have one misgiving about Gail's argument from the financial angle. I fear (yes) that governments (the US mostly) will become so obsessed with maintaining political and military power they will essentially force-march the oil, coal and gas recovery efforts at bayonet point. Either nationalize the companies, or make the economics so attractive (tax havens, no regulations, slave labor) they continue working the plays even at a loss. "Energy" will have become the monstrous two-headed step child of the M/IC before the end, with all subsequent monetary and ethical decision points taken from the vantage point of super corporations, military adventures, and greedy politicians. There is no data to support my fear except for thousands of years of human history. I'm afraid these power structures will not go gently into the night but will fight and if need be destroy everything in sight before they come crashing down in a heap of blind miscalculation.
I'm not sure that makes sense?
If it takes more than a barrel of oil input to produce a barrel of oil, no one will produce that barrel. It's a hard production limit.
But you forget, we have a printing press.
The argument from economics is not exactly the same as the argument from EROEI. The former is what is being trotted out more often these days, the idea being that we'll go broke (cannot form capital) some time before it takes a barrel of oil to recover a barrel of oil.
And even when it takes a two barrels per barrel I think they'll force it to be done. They will want a story -- see we're pumping out there! -- to keep the prols happy in their cubicals and suburbs, and driving to Mal-mart.
The day when the tankers don't pull into the refinery -- no matter what it cost to get the tanker there -- is the day the entire world catches on fire and burns.
EDIT: Not to belabor the point but the energy needed to extract oil (just to take the example) can come from other sources. Oil is more critical to our sense of well-being than coal, for example, so they can use coal power to get more oil and in that way keep people driving around as normal. They can then use prison inmate slave labor to get at the coal and nobody complains that the prisons slowly empty. One can make a similar argument for fracking. The costs of extraction are somewhat fungible; if we're down to doing whatever it takes to maintain the visuals, then we're doing whatever works no matter what the accountants think about it. I can see it running that direction, but it's a huge leap. Gail is probably correct in the near term.
"The day when the tankers don't pull into the refinery -- no matter what it cost to get the tanker there -- is the day the entire world catches on fire and burns."
probably the same day that we roll over 2,000 on the gigatonometer. At 50Gt/yr and rising we'll hit 1,000 by about 2020 and 2,000 by 2040.
I might live to hear the weather forecast that day...
If you are a Demorat, which angers you most? That Hillary and Obomber lied to you about Benghazi, or that they thought you were dumb enough to believe a 6 month old Youtube video was the cause?
They weren't wrong to believe it. Democrats seem to be the dumbest piece of shit in the septic tank.
"duh he's a democrat, he must be a good guy"
Not that there's anything much better in the other side of sphincter that is DC
Q: How many democraps does it take to change a light bulb?
A: That's not funny and your a racist...
The Dems don't have a monopoly, read this:
http://budget.house.gov/uploadedfiles/fy15_blueprint.pdf
They have to dehumanize you before they kill you.
Not always. About 15% of the male population can kill without being sociopathic or psychopathic, nor needing to dehumanize the foe. They just have the capacity to kill, with little or no psychological cost.
Liars
The worse and more blatant the crimes,
the more obviously stupid must be the fabrications and lies
employed as attempted cover.
The leaders are neither stupid nor ignorant.
They know even more about the extent and self-serving nature of their foul deeds than does the public.
If the Queen is provoking domestic and international distractions to serve as cover for Benghazi, may God strike them.
The divisive, lying tone in this country for the past five years, although existing for decades, was ramped up and doubled down on by the arrogant, narcissitic, pathologic lying illegal indonesian kenyan alien muslim sociopath and fudge packer in chief and its mminions... no other occupant of the 1600 PA ave in the past five decades has been so divisive of the country and been such a lying sack of human colonic detritus for its own political agenda and gains at the expense of the US constitution, hard working tax paying U S citiizens and world view of America..... and the sheeple elected and reelected this poor excuse of a "leader"???
a million individual decisions (including lying) that make perfect sense end up looking stupid from a macro perspective
And Kunts ler helps the stupidity by being the typical "journalist" who is willfully blind to the fact that THERE IS NO LAW. because the executor of the law (Obama) is not a legal natural born Citizen, since he was born BRITISH, of a British subject father. They ALL know this. Congress-- ALL of THEM (including Ron Paul) committed treason by allowing a Usurper into the WH. The first order of business in re asserting the LAW is to remove the Usurper, and hang the coconspirators in Congress, but idiots like Kunts ler, think it's a "conspiracy theory".
It is a FACT. Obama is an illegal POTUS. Do you really think that the framers, in their effort to prevent foreign influence (John Jay wrote 6 Federalist papers on the subject, and Washington warned direly of it in his farewell speech), would have allowed the children of NON US Citizen parents to be President and CIC of the Armed Forces? Really? GET A CLUE!!! Obama is the poster boy for why the framers wanted to prevent non natural born Citizens from the Presidency. (The framers themselves were not nbCs but grandfathered themselves in with "or a citizen at the time of the ratification..." , since the first natural born Citizens were only 13-- born since 7/4/1776. No one born after the ratification, of any foreign parent, is eligible)
The sad thing is that our soldiers are dying for someone who is illegal, knows it, and has no attachment or allegiance.
Kunts ler could have trumpeted this FACT, and educated the public, as could many journalists--- But they are ALL WILLFULLY BLIND COWARDS.
Look around. Do you see any law for the .1%? Do you think they know that there is no law? Why do you think other ineligible candidates are being touted by the R Party (Cruz, Jindal, Rubio--- all born of non citizen fathers, and not eligible-- all cretins and frauds)?
Chill, brah. We got bigger problems.
Like the fact that this idiot Knustler voted for Obummer TWICE, yet still thinks he's got a coherent message to deliver.
I don't see those as dependencies. Jim is fairly up front saying that O is a total loser, I take that as being a man about it and facing up to a moment of weakness.
We're going to have to start thinking very differently about many things, going forward. The road to Hell is looking mighty straight and wide.
Really? There are bigger problems than an ILLEGAL President? Seriously dude. Do you think it's an accident?
*sigh*
Stormfront must be down again...
I said he was born BITISH, not black (or half black)
if everyone knows you are lying then who is buying the lies that justify the actions? only the stupid. who are the stupid? the 98%. who are the 98%? 1% of the country has all the wealth. the next 1% know much of the first 1% wealth was earned in a rigged game meant to sustain their wealth even at the expense of the 99%. so the 98% are the stupidest people on earth with the stupidest of the stupidest in the good old usa. the bottom half(the 98%, yogi berra math) of the class run the whole show and the top 1% tell them how to dance and sing so everyone stays in line and in tune.......and the 1% who know the truth can bleat and butt heads all they want but without the support of the 98% nothing will change. considering critical mass for chnge occurs at about 5% support level the prospect for change is close to nil in the usa. there just aren't enough people who know any better.
Try reading "Political Ponerology" and you will realize that the problem is psychopathy... and once they get their foot in the door, they want to train everyone to be like them, only since the rest of us have a conscience, the closest we can get is to become sociopaths, and together we are praised as 'the best and the brightest', be it Wall Street, the Pentagon, the Church, the mainstream media, the govt, their friends in academia, the 'arts' and entertainment or the local jail. The pathology speads like a virus if not stopped early on... nipped in the bud... but we have let it bloom. That book is about how the psychos took over Eastern Europe back in the day, and with our USA kind of love, spreading to the Ukraine, Syria and nearly every spot on the planet. The viurs spreads until it kills the host and thereby itself. It is blind and operates as programmed. It is a human predator. It is merely doing what comes naturally.
Remember back in the day when some of the 'Founding Fathers' were complaining about how illuminatti types were infiltrating their Masonic Lodges? See the pattern? Lying or stupid or just predatorial and they go after the early prey, remember that.
Yep. I read a long letter to Washington warning him of these guys. He was already aware of them. They were elusive.
You may be right on the group think in organizations. At the individual level however it is down to everyone protecting their rice bowl. Group-think and a neutral position are rewarded, while those who rock the boat are identified early and eliminated from the public discourse.
Maybe the only hope for us is open border immigration, - as long as we get more independent thinkers rather than compliant sheep. A very large number of the American population is incapable or unable to change. If 2014 and 2016 do not turn things around, I think we are done.
Name me just ONE of these low-life's that can turn anything around. De Tocqueville was right, America will be good as long as the people are good, or something to that effect.
Is there anyone on ZH that holds hope that the people are grounded in civility and industry? I see a bunch of dumbed down entitled worthless masses that expect something free from the producing minority.
Truth is, illegals are a necessity, Americans on average are too sorry to work.
Feet, don't fail me now.
The system has evolved (devolved?) to the pont where our processes actually SELECT for the craziest nutters and ONLY the craziest nutters. Non-mentally ill people cannot compete...not in politics, in higher levels of business, in Hollyweird, in just about every sector of society. It's not just in politics. If you won't work 100 hour work weeks, obsess over your career, you lose to those that do. This process ensures only the pathologically obsessed get to the 'top' and 'succeed.' They are mentally ill, functional, but ill. Crazy.
enough problem whats the answer
pentagon hit by invisible plane, other 9-11 fables
O's SSN, O's birth certificate, O's entire bio, O's promises
Clinton's cattlegate etc.
benghazi, Libya, Syria, Iraq etc....
NSA blatant lying
GMO, vaccines
most troubling to me is the complete lack of effort put into the lies. Maybe TPTB are making it so obvious they want to know who is still awake. Mabye they outsourced these things to idiots. Maybe some of both. Any other ideas why the lying is so blatant. Owning the MSM is key of course
Understanding how disinformation works is the real key. Everyone understands the impossiblity of keeping up appearances of coherence when the whole story is based upon lies.
So what do you do to solve this problem if you are a serial liar? Why you have the "wrong people" uncover them, which will totally discredit the truth in the eyes of the polarized.
You wouldn't be suprised to 'discover' that the desert is dry, would you?
You wouldn't be suprised to 'discover' that the swamp is wet, would you?
Or that the sewer reeks?
Why is Kunstler suprised to 'discover' that politicians are liars, and bureaucrats are incompentent would-be tyrants?
Just who, exactly, is being stupid here?
As I mentioned up thread, he voted for Obummer twice. So it's blantanly obvious from where the stupidity emanates.
Thing is, this shit sells books to those who are even dumber than he is.
And he probably voted for Bush twice. Therefore, what's your fucking point? Political tribal bullshit, that's all it is.
Yes.
"Are They Lying, Or Just Stupid?"
Sadly, BOTH...
the kunt came back for another round of lies - tell cass i said fuck you - i don't need any cognitive infiltration, fuck you very much. stupidity is plausible deniability for wickedness. i don't buy the stupidity argument, kunt.
Try changing your meds.
In my not so humble opinion, the real problem is that the powers that be have lied so long, they now believe their own lies. That assume the godlike mantle of they have said it, so it must be true. With such a distorted world view, it's no mystery everything is EFFED THE HELL UP.
All this crap is tied together with a bow that spells out "PNAC". They tried and mostly failed to get Clinton on board (Kosovo and NAFTA were exceptions), then when Cheney stole the 2000 election for "W" things really got rolling. Remember Cheney's energy meeting that was SO secret he took it to his hunting buddies at SCOTUS (and won, it's still secret). They divided up the Iraq oil before the shok & awe, guaranteed. Open your eyes to see that all this shit is tied together. "9-11" didn't just "happen" and it surely didn't occur as advertised. Obama's a pawn, Cheney is still pulling the strings from "Site R", and Obama is firmly under control as "frontman". Did I say it's all tied together? And by plan?
"Many a nation has lost its freedom at the end of a gun barrel, but here in America, we just decided to hand it over voluntarily. Worse yet, we paid for the tyranny and usurpation out of our own pockets with "voluntary" tax contributions and the use of a debt-laden fiat currency!"
-Peter Kershaw
The fact we paid for it is the part that chaps my ass.
Polymarkos:In my not so humble opinion, the real problem is that the powers that be have lied so long, they now believe their own lies.
Yes, like George Costanza in the "Friends" TV sitcom....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn_PSJsl0LQ
It takes almost no hedging and zero knowledge to know all we've got is shale.
Never before has mankind diverted such a large percentage of wealth into intangible products or goods. I contend this is the primary reason that inflation has not become a major issue. The modern economy is loaded with interwoven contracts reeking of contagion. If faith drops in these intangible "promises" and money suddenly begins to flow into tangible goods seeking a safe haven inflation could soar even as debts go unpaid and promises are left unfilled. Like many people I worry about the massive debt being accumulated by governments and the rate that central banks have expanded the money supply.
The timetable on which events unfold is often quite uneven and this supports the possibility of an inflation scenario. A key issue being one of timing. If the price of gas jumps to $8 a gallon overnight do you buy gas and not make your car payment or stop driving the twenty miles to work? Answer, it could be months before your car is repossessed so you buy gas. It is important to remember that debts can go unpaid and promises be left unfilled. More on how we have sowed the seeds for inflation to suddenly strike in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2014/04/inflation-seed-of-economic-chaos....
Yes, they are lying and Yes, they are often stupid. But that really doesn't get to the nub of the problem.
Far more worrying is that they are criminal psychopaths (aka "madmen") who should be removed from public office and any other position of power and influence.