In his hit song, “Somebody’s Crying”, Chris Isaak laments that somebody’s lying; it’s a great song and a lyrical wonder by a truly gifted artist. It’s sad but true that in life we cry when someone lies to us, especially when it’s someone you love; so America, by now you should have cried oceans of tears as that someone is your own country, or more accurately, your own government.
I recently read that most of mass media relies on statistics based on what people click on social media to determine what they will print, and how to present it. The usual field is about a million of the most recent from which they will take about the top one to two percent. Most of the “Woke” movement is found on social media, so its migration to mass media is not hard to understand. The publisher’s motivation, besides their political and social leanings, is profits, i.e. income from advertisers; it’s what sells that matters, not what is true. The result is the suppression of facts and the marginalization of contrarian views, a kind of journalistic cancel culture. Those that don’t fit in the program are either disregarded with whatever label is deemed the current villain, like “racists”, “fascists”, “oppressors”, “privileged”, “sexists”, “ableists”, etc., or simply fired.
A good friend recently told me that people just don’t want to read a lot anymore; newspapers that post articles that go beyond the front page are not as popular as tabloids. So while the above may seem a new phenomenon, it’s really just a variation on an old theme. Lies and labels are the tools of ochlocracies and autocrats, demagogues and dictators, in the sordid history of partisan politics. Think about America’s history just about a century back with all the stuff we were told to believe that was pure nonsense; true, we could go back further, but there’s plenty of material in this time frame.
Try the Spanish American War; “Remember the Maine!” was the cry. The historical fact is that it was a faulty boiler explosion that sunk the Maine, not Spanish sabotage. Lots of people died in that fabricated conflict. Yes, somebody was lying, so there was a lot of crying.
Then we have the 1913 Federal Reserve Act, to create a central bank to help stabilize our economy. Really great job depreciating the USD by 96% to today’s value; now that has to be one of the great lies of all time, and sadly one many still believe. Imagine telling people for more than a century that inflation is a good thing while they wake up day after day with the dollar they have constantly worth less; no imagination needed, the lie continues while the cries go ignored.
Then we have the 16th amendment, providing for a tax formerly prohibited by the constitution, an amendment the history of which is loaded with as many lies as there were states voting on ratification. Contrary to what many conservatives say today, and many people believe, it was not proposed by the Democrats under Wilson, but by Republicans under Taft. The ratification process had so many irregularities that provide some very interesting questions which have never been resolved. It also did not provide for payroll withholding at all; that was an FDR manipulation to fund his New Deal. One lie on top of another, and we really need a good cry.
Then we have the Great War, the “War to End All Wars”. The US joined the slaughter because the Germans attacked the Lusitania, a British passenger ship that was carrying munitions and with Americans on board. That was not the story line reported, so someone was lying. About 4.7M Americans were involved in that war, of which about a half million died, were wounded or suffered from diseases in the trenches; that war should be renamed the “Great Lie”.
What followed the Great War were two catastrophic events that were to lead to so many more deaths. One was the Spanish Flu, which was named not because of its origins as many were told (Spain was neutral in WWI), but mysteriously out of an Army post in Indiana as later reported. Actually not so mysterious as the soldiers there were returning from the horrors of the “Trench Warfare” (more like sewers) of WWI, most likely the origins of this multimillion people killer; big lies cause big cries.
The second catastrophic event of WWI was the Treaty of Versailles, so vengeful and destructive, creating the social cesspool from which Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and Stalin arose. There are so many contrived reasons given for the rise of such dictators, most ignoring the social and economic chaos created by WWI, the Versailles Treaty and the pandemic that followed that we have to wonder at the gullibility of not just those lied to, but the liars themselves. The politicians that caused these horrible events must have lied to themselves to concoct and promote such vacuous reasoning, but the people cried from the suffering they caused.
Then we have the Great Depression. We were told the causes were things like speculation, unregulated banking, stock market manipulation, etc. Missing of course was the real culprit of what today we would call “accommodative monetary and fiscal policy”, i.e. massive liquidity providing the boom and bust cycle we have come to take for granted, this one particularly chaotic. We were told that FDR had a plan, the New Deal, to save the country, but it was a raw deal that made things worse; we were told it was for the greater good, and that was really lying, so we kept on crying. The New Deal did nothing to abate the Great Depression, but in fact prolonged it; sadly it was WWII that did more to end it than FDR’s irresponsible policies ever did; now that’s something to really cry about.
The beginning of America as a “Warfare State” really took flight with the Korean War, called at the time the “Korean Conflict”, which we somehow had to get involved with to stop socialism and Red China’s aggression. It was actually a civil war, but that was not the acceptable spin, and so again someone lied, many people died, and many people cried.
But why stop there? Liars love spin, and with the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” you get a really big lie, and with Viet Nam you get a really big cry. In order to stop a fantasy “Domino Effect” we get the lie that bankrupted a generation and caused a social eruption that fractured a nation, and I’m not talking Viet Nam, I’m referring to the US.
Of course we can’t leave out one of my favorite lies, the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” of Iraq. So much a catchy phrase that we gave it initials, “WMD”. Apparently we’re good at that, but not seeing the big lie it was, and after more than a decade of “Nation Building” there and twenty plus years in Afghanistan, we hear stupid stuff like “mission accomplished”; yeah, killing thousands of innocent civilians not to mention US soldiers is quite an accomplishment, together with the inevitable bankruptcy it will contribute to. The bigger the lie, the longer we will cry.
But we’re even better at the big lies economically, as in the “Financial Crisis”. Now even the name is a lie, it was an intelligence crisis. We create the bubbles and wonder why they burst, and then we come up with an even bigger lie; we call it “Quantitative Easing”, and in true form we give it initials, QE, because we’re too damn lazy to say the entire phrase, more honestly being corporate bailouts.
Needless to say, the Trump Era (which may not be over yet) saw abundant lying, like the wall against immigration, Russian interference if not collusion, Ukrainian coercion, and of course voter fraud. Amazingly, the crying was more from those in denial of anything that Trump did wrong, but on the other hand, the hypocrisy from those who so dramatically expressed offense yet provided little in the way of meaningful and effective action. It was a circus of lies and ineptitude, but I think the most hurtful crying may still await us.
So true to form, when presented by what we call a “pandemic” for Covid, a true stretch of terms considering a world death toll nearing 0.05% compared to the Black Plague that claimed a death toll of somewhere (best guesses) between 21% to 57% of the world’s population, or more recently the Spanish Flu with a .10% death toll. We were told we needed to “flatten the curve” by cancelling all economic activity for just a few months; that then became a few more, and now we have more than a year and a half, killing the livelihood of millions, likely eventually killing many more than the pandemic itself.
So when you lie, you find the need to keep lying in the hope of covering up your previous lies, which of course leads to the need to perpetuate the lies, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Now we have the “American Recovery”, as if the very idiots that caused a massive economic catastrophe can somehow bring us to a so called recovery. There’s no Heimlich maneuver for that, but lies are the tonic for fools.
Remember Judy Mikovits? She was the scientist who took records from the NIH that would reportedly expose Fauci’s involvement with NIH funding of the Wuhan Lab’s chimeric experiments with Covid viruses. She was arrested without a warrant, detained and then released, but only after those records were retrieved. What we have now are insistent news stories into the origins of Coivd at those same labs, and an apparent US funding for its research. I wonder what lies await us.
We are told that green energy will lead to a cleaner environment, but what we are told is not supported by basic science and engineering, which informs us that the highest efficiency possible for conversion of the sun’s photons to electrons is 33%, and for wind 60%. Currently our best solar panels have a 26% conversion, and wind turbines 45%, so we are getting closer to maximum efficiency. However, the input to produce solar panels, wind turbines and electric car batteries takes ten times the quantity of materials compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy.
We also have the disposal issue; by 2050 the quantity of expired and non-recyclable solar panels will double the tonnage of all of today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage. Now all this is not to say that we shouldn’t strive for cleaner energy, but to propose trillions of dollars of government funds to invest in technologies that are not only less efficient but actually require more mining of materials and produce more waste does not actually translate as a cleaner alternative.
No doubt the end of the internal combustion engine is inevitable given the accelerating rate of technological progress, but the alternatives being promoted by the cronies of government subsidies are far from sustainable; lies get access to the taxpayer’s pockets, but crying about that does not seem to impress the power elite.
Lying and crying will not change facts, so Americans need to get the truth and get it out there for all to see. As John Adams said “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
Libera Voce 