Lies

Open Thread

Mark Noonan20 Comments

The MSM is increasing the “Democrats are surging to victory” Narrative. Still, though, with the whispered “but not really” articles here and there. They know the Democrats are getting wiped out. Among other reasons, here’s why:

The Dow is down 18.5% so far in 2022. I haven’t even checked my 401K because I don’t need that negative energy in my life (plus I’m wedded to “dollar cost averaging” in my investment strategy).

Oh, and gas prices have started to rise in some areas. And I paid more than $8 for a 12 pack of Coke. And they were nearly out of avocados. And totally out of the Diet Pepsi the Mrs prefers.

Basically, things are bad and getting worse – and the only thing the Democrats have is abortion and they are running hard on it. Now, could there be a solid majority for abortion in America? People so committed to it that they’ll turn the election for the Democrats? I doubt it. We’ll find out November 8th.

Some people have pointed out that it would be strange for Democrats/MSM to lie about how things are going – in other words, if they spend the next 6 weeks lying about how it will be, they’ll look terribly bad when the results are 180 from their assertions. This is a lack of understanding about how lies work – first and foremost, they work. They always work. No lie has even been spoken that didn’t work.

What do I mean? Surely there have been failed lies.

Well, sure. In fact, all lies fail. They can’t do other than fail. But for the liar, that isn’t the point. No liar is good at long-term thinking. Liars lie because they want to wring whatever advantage they can out of the moment. The cheating husband isn’t thinking about how his lies to his wife will work a year from now – he just wants to get away with his adultery right now. For the liar, all lies work because at least for a second, at the bare minimum, you are spending time refuting the lie – you are not advancing your own cause. You are on defense…while the liar already has his next lie lined up…and is advancing his cause while you’re refuting his last lie.

We can never know counter-factuals but it is my assertion that if the mere truth had been told in 2020, Trump would have won better than 60% of the vote and the GOP would have secured very large Congressional majorities. I’m not talking switching the MSM from anti- to pro-Trump: I’m saying that if the mere truth had been spoken, it would have been like that. That Biden was already in massive cognitive decline; that Hunter’s laptop and all the vileness on it was real; that the FBI has spent years lying about Trump/Russia; that Covid escaped from a Chinese lab and that lockdowns weren’t necessary; that VBM was obviously and only a method of voter fraud. On and on and on like that – the incumbent riding that wave of Truth would have crushed the hapless Democrats.

Lies work – even very stupid lies, such as Trump-Russia or the “very fine people” lie which Pudding Brain asserts was his reason for running. They have a corrosive effect – even the most wise are prey to them. Maybe there’s something to it? comes very much into play…but even with all those lies, Trump won more than 11 million more votes than in 2016: and so my assertion about how it would have gone if the truth had been told. So, the lies they’re using here in 2022 will also work…what should be a 50 seat House gain will probably be 30 or so. It’ll work – it’ll keep the Democrats in the game, and for the liars, that is all that matters.

Now, on to the really scary thing: the murder of Cayler Ellingson: this is a watershed moment in the life of our Republic. A kid was hunted down and murdered for his political beliefs. The last time this sort of thing happened the Freedom Riders were trying to end Jim Crow. But there’s a difference – back then, the Establishment was on the side of the hunted. Here in 2022, it is on the side of the hunters. Even the allegedly GOP AG is downplaying it – and the murderer was charged basically with leaving the scene of an accident and given bail…while J6 detainees are sitting in solitary for trespassing. Make no mistake about it – this is very bad. Joe Biden in his Hitlerian speech the other day gave permission for this…and if our Republican leaders don’t start punishing the Democrats for this sort of thing then people will start to defend themselves against perceived threats.

The Lies That Bind Us

Mark Noonan35 Comments

I always recommend people read Samuel Eliott Morrison’s The Two Ocean War if you want a good run down on American naval operations in WWII. It was published in 1963 and still is a huge trove of good, historical information. OTOH, a few bits need to be taken with a grain of salt: most notably, the campaign against the U Boats.

You see, when Morrison wrote the book, the Ultra Secret was still secret. It was more than 10 years later that the British and American governments fessed up to having been reading the German’s mail. The intel gained from Ultra wasn’t good in a fast moving situation (ie, when the battle was actually on going) but the knowledge it gave us of German strategy, tactics and material condition was invaluable. If we didn’t have it – and no A bomb was forthcoming – WWII in Europe might have lasted years longer. I bring this up because Morrison, in his book, lays all the credit for the victory over the U Boats to intrepid sailors and merchant mariners. Not to take anything away from them – they did, after all, actually have to go sea and fight the U Boats – but the fact that the allies generally knew (except in a few brief periods when the Krauts altered their coding machines) where the subs were going to be gave our side an overwhelming advantage. I mean, for the Germans to have a comparable advantage, they’d have to know the exact route and timing of the convoys. It was that valuable.

This is important to a full understanding of how history works: you really don’t know until all cards are on the table. You especially wont know if the events are recent (“recent” in historic terms in the previous 100-150 years) and people still have axes to grind. The first draft of history is usually riddled with falsehoods deliberate or otherwise. And some things never come out. When the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire committed suicide in 1889, it struck the world like a thunderbolt. A good looking man with all the possible advantages offs himself after murdering a young girl he talked into murder-suicide. As it was more than 130 years ago, very much is known about it. But not all. Some crucial information about what the heir was doing and saying in the immediate run up to the suicide is not known…but, we know that certain people had to know. They were close to the Imperial family and were in contact with the heir. But, as far as we can tell, the heirs of the people who knew – if they are still in possession of the letters and documents their ancestors had – still rate loyalty to the Hapsburgs above historic interest and so the secrets remain.

A great deal of what we all believe regarding events of the past 100 years is shot through with things that have been presented to us with crucial data missing, or are outright fabrications. To take it out of politics, think about the “rock n roll” rebel thing: these kids just aren’t gonna take it any more and they’re going to show you squares what’s what! That is the main thing about rock music…it is supposedly transgressive and something that all powers try to suppress. But, to believe this, you have to believe that a man with no professional musical training ( he can’t even read music) did Hey, Jude right out of his head.

Sorry, didn’t happen. Oh, to be sure, McCartney might have written the lyrics, but all of that gorgeous musical triumph was the result of highly skilled people turning McCartney’s scribble on a napkin into the Sistine Chapel. And so it was with almost all pop music and the entirety of the commercially successful pop music. A genuine musician like Mark Knopfler or the late Neal Peart can break through and be very successful, but the bottom line is that most popular music is made by and for corporate overlords who put massive efforts into finding out what will sell and then making what sells. And no matter what, the real musicians aren’t going to rake it in like Madonna. And do understand this: genius is rare. Very are. Once in half a thousand years a Mozart will pop up. But isn’t it funny that every freaking week there’s a new number one hit? Figure the odds that the music industry will hit the jackpot like that again and again. Nope: doesn’t happen. The hits aren’t from some guy or gal who through grit and determination rises to the top: the hits are manufactured. There is a joke meme out there with a faceless musician on it with the caption saying words to the effect of “Hi, I’m Celebrity 3297: I believe whatever is safe and popular for the 18-35 demographic, please like me on social media and buy my album”: that is pretty much it.

Of late the members of the band Rage Against the Machine have been dragged quite a bit on social media because they have been very firm in supporting mask and vaccine mandates. I mean, come on! But, then again, you had to know: once you see the backgrounds of the members, you know you’re not dealing with outcasts who are gonna tell us what’s what about the hypocrisies of our times. They’re middle to upper-middle class kids who never knew a minute of deprivation in their lives. They can’t really tell us about the hypocrisies of our society because they are the hypocrisies of our society…in this case, the Socialist hypocrite who talks a big game of Revolution before taking his new car back to his gated community. The boys of Rage were always mere tools of corporate salesmanship…and as the corporation still provides the money, these guys aren’t going to bite the hand that extremely lavishly feeds them.

But think of this: we really do, most of us, believe there was a grassroots rebellion against the squares which started in the 50’s with Elvis and culminated with the 60’s and 70’s. But Elvis was merely the first successful marketing effort. As far as music goes, Chuck Berry was better…it was just that back in those days, you couldn’t sell it with a black face. Additionally, we now know that a great deal of the post-WWII avant-guarde was initially promoted and funded by the CIA and other government-connected agencies. The official idea was to show the Communist world that we were more hip than they were. Personally, I think it was an op by KGB-controlled CIA agents to corrupt the West…I mean, the USSR wasn’t stupid enough to allow hippies; and the most brutal Stalinist art is still miles ahead of some of the absurdities we’ve placed in American art museums.

We were played. And we’ve been played again and again: a huge amount of effort has been placed into making us believe certain things about the past which all go in one direction: leaving the current Ruling Class in place. When you rage against the machine, you might say a couple tame things against corporations and government…but most of your fire is directed at the Church, the family…working for a living, being faithful, keeping your promise. See how it works? Think about what is really attacked in popular culture: Faith, Family and Property. You are to ridicule the belief in God; to despise mommy and daddy and not want that for yourself, you are to hate mommy and daddy’s middle class home in the ‘burbs. So, what does that leave you? An atom in a city without love or hope and no property. The perfect demographic for corporate and government overlords…who have convinced most people that this is what we wanted.

If you really start to ponder it, you can see more and more of the con emerge. The “Conservatism” which was about lower corporate taxes and no fight for border security. The heroes who aren’t intrepid warriors, but failures who need counseling. The digs against maintaining our individual dignity (wear the tube top and the pants around your knees! Look like a whore or a gangster!). It isn’t a Conspiracy in the sense that only one person or one small group is running it but it is every institution of government, media and major corporation all on the same page in desiring a compliant, ignorant, frightened population.

The good news – and this will be Trump’s greatest triumph for all time to come – is that between 2016 and 2020, the mask dropped. It can’t be put back on again. We saw them for what they were. To remain in favor of things as they are, one has to be either a moron, or paid off. Once you see the lie – the really broad lie – you can’t unsee it. Whether or no we’ll be able to beat it remains to be seen, but we can no longer be suckered by it. Day by day, those of us who had our minds freed can simply see more and more of the lies. They are now easy for us to detect and they no longer are binding upon us. What remains to be seen is if they can remain binding on enough people to stop us.

The Lies We Contend With

Mark Noonan71 Comments

When Andrew Yang announced he was leaving the Democrat party, I commented to him that nearly everything he believed was a lie, but also noting that huge amounts of what I used to believe were lies as well. That I now could see the whole system of lies, right and left, which have been used to keep we, the people compliant. Then someone asked me when did the lies start?

To be sure, there have been lies since the Garden. But I do believe what we’ve dealt with these past decades is unique in human history: a whole series of lies maintained at all costs by people who do know better. And while it grew out of a host of factors, I pinpoint the need for a system of lies to the Korean War, specifically to the Truman Administration decision to not seek victory.

We were all told – and we all believed – that when Truman fired MacArthur it was the right and brave thing to do. That MacArthur was off the ranch and threatened not merely a Third World War, but the very Constitutional structure of the United States. Like all good lies, this had a kernel of truth: as a military officer, MacArthur was bound to obey the orders of his civilian Commander in Chief. But that bit of truth was used to blind us to the fact that in a cold blooded and cruel manner, Truman and his Administration had decided that people would continue to die, with no hope of victory, until the Communists decided to end the killing. That was the issue. It always was the issue. And it isn’t even mentioned, for the most part. When it is, it is quickly passed over. No one wants to really consider this. Most of the people who died in the Korean War – Koreans, Chinese and Americans – died after Truman made his decision. They died fighting it out on an arbitrary line of no moral or strategic value. Truman did this. And then slept soundly at night. So did the Defense officials and the generals. The soldiers on the line slept less soundly. And they died. Truman’s decision wasn’t made to spare lives, but merely to sustain the decision he had made to enter the war when he had lost the will to win the war. He lied to the American people in order to save his political prospects.

Sound familiar?

When the Chinese intervened we had two morally acceptable courses open to us: fight it out to victory, or to capitulate. We chose the immoral path: keep fighting, but only to provide cover for a coward’s decision to neither win nor quit. Rely on it: they sized it up. They knew that with our absolute command of the sea and our aerial superiority that the Chinese could not force us all the way out of Korea. They could calculate: this many dead and wounded per month, this large a pool of draftees to send: presto, we could sustain the line indefinitely. All it would take is lots of people – mostly poorer people the leaders never met – dying. The Western Front is held up as the immoral waste of lives, but it wasn’t: as many mistakes as the Allies made, their goal was always total victory. The lives weren’t to be expended to no point. In Korea, they were to be expended pointlessly. And to do this, they had to lie. They had to tell us that if we went for victory, it would lead to WWIII as the Russians would go to war with us and we’d all be nuked. End of the world! If we don’t have Johnny from Akron and Li from Shanghai blow each other to bits over and over again, we’re all gonna die!!!!

Too bad for Johnny and Li: but, hey, at least 24 hour round the clock nuclear holocaust was avoided.

Flaw in the theory: Russia only exploded her first nuke in 1949 and the best they had for a strategic bombing was the TU-4, a reverse engineered B-29 which was incapable of reaching most of the United States from Soviet air bases. Even we didn’t have a real nuclear bomber until the introduction of the B-36 in 1948. Nuclear war as in total wipe of humanity simply wasn’t in the cards during any point of the Korean War. Additionally, there was very little chance that an aging Stalin would bring his country into another World War as Russia was still rebuilding from WWII (it would be the mid-60’s before Russia was fully recovered from the destruction of WWII).

In short, a cruel calculation was made to not win as that seemed more difficult and then a series of lies were generated to explain why we wouldn’t win but the dying would keep going. That, in my view, is when our government became a web of lies…and when all sides of the political spectrum (except a few put down as kooks) became wedded to the web of lies.

In the end, we built up a massive, national security State in service to this concept that at any moment now the Russians would nuke us and so we had to have a massive nuclear force on hair trigger alert, a gigantic Army ready to fight (but not win!) anywhere in the world and a whole bunch of what we were doing kept secret from the people, who were to be monitored and manipulated. By the 1960’s, in my view, the thing was feeding on itself. Just getting ever more crazy and using ever larger amounts of BS to justify itself. Because after a while, people were invested in it. Defense contractors, think tanks, universities, media companies: a whole host of individuals and institutions essentially made their living by sustaining the fiction that we can’t win a war, but we needed a massive military and secret police (FBI, CIA, NSA) to fend off defeat. Nobody was ever allowed to do two things which would cut to the chase:

Drive the Marxists out of America

Directly confront the USSR with a “war or quit” ultimatum.

We couldn’t do these things because they would solve the problem. Getting rid of the American Marxists would end the internal threat and challenging the Soviets to fight or back off would either get them to back off, or get them to fight (they would have backed off: the balance of forces all through the Cold War was overwhelmingly in our favor – they knew it, and so did we).

We had to pretend that having Che Guevara wanna-bees in our schools and bureaucracies was just the price of freedom. Even so-called Conservatives said we had no right to push such people out. We had to allow America to be flooded with a series of corrosive, anti-human Marxist ideologies which sapped our will and warped our sense of right and wrong. And we had to do this simply to sustain lies. In this case, the lie that if we didn’t let our enemies subvert us, our enemies would win. And still all based on the first lie: the Korea Lie – that we can’t win a stand up fight to simply end this once and for all.

Here in 2021, it is all self-sustained. We’re not even allowed to win a fight with rag tag Islamist militias. And we’re appointing Marxist economists to positions in our government.

Reject it all: reject all the lies. You don’t have to fund your enemies. You don’t have to sustain the National Security State. You don’t have to protect those who hate you and want you enslaved. You are sane. You want law and order, sound economics, your people come first: these are normal, sane attitudes and anything against them has to go down. Your laws are for you: for sanity. Not for them, the insane. The liars. The laws do not protect evil. They do not foster insanity. Anyone who says they do is lying to you. Ignore them and take what is yours by right: take back, that is, your citizenship in the Republic and insist that the Republic exist for you, not for those who hate you and lie to you and wish to plunder you.