Friday, May 9, 2014

Surveil This

[2-19-14]

     Take notice, y'all Secret Police sons of bitches (this dishonorific not meant as gender-specific.):

     We're not sure where you're from, but around here, secrecy in government would be our own worst enemy, so we don't allow it.  A truly free, informed People like we are can manage our affairs nicely, thank you, without your very dubious 'assistance.'  We're actually competent at figuring out what's good for us, what's the smart decision in any given case.  Should we decide to do something stupid, we goddamned sure won't need any help from the likes of you.  This may come as a great surprise to you who pose as Intelligence Experts, but you'll get over this shock if you live long enough to wise up, and we hope you do.  We also look forward to seeing you indicted, charged, arrested, tried by Due Process, convicted of some of the horrific crimes of which you are manifestly guilty, then appropriately sentenced, and we're working on it.  We strongly suggest it might help your likely legal difficulties if you now (now) find the nearest whistle and blow the crap out of it, just like your life depends on it.  With feeling.  You can see, can you not, that we are not holding our breath?
     Unlike yourselves, we abide by the Law -- we stop on the red and go on the green -- simply to get along.  This is a Basic Awareness kind of deal, and you need to be taking notes.  You will be tested.
     Let's be doubly clear, for the benefit of your many belabored 'analysts:'

  • Secrecy is the dark enemy of any enlightened People.  Ben Franklin clearly warned the new Republic against it to start with.  Mr. Franklin had observed first-hand for some years how the monarchies of Europe worked it.  He cautioned that once 'covert' actions were allowed, they quickly become the MAIN behavior of renegade governments.  Good call, Ben.
  • Secrecy got the corpirations enthroned in the United States, as announced then by Abe Lincoln in 1865, to the destruction of our democratic Republic.  Really.
  • Secrecy has kept that dire turning point very well camouflaged even to this day.
  • Secrecy brought us all this War Business -- ALL if it, to ALL of us --demanding ever more secrecy, and not a lick of it justified, ever.
  • Secrecy is the servant of traitors and other unfaithful cowards; corrupt politicians; embezzlers; blind-side 'economists;' lawyers; thieves; bushwackers; the extremely filthy rich; and other species of criminals, and no one else.  If you've a fondness for secrecy, you are counted in this disgusting company; congratulations are not in order, but arrest warrants are.
  • Secrecy gets our Presidents murdered, among many others, followed by horseshit cover-stories instead of Justice.
  • Secrecy allowed a Presidential election to be stolen from beneath our noses, letting a witless clown into the White House.
  • Secrecy let that same unelected, witless clown lead us into war on Iraq based on 'intelligence' which ranged all the way from POOR to NONE.
  • Secrecy cost us 60,000 Americans, and counting, in the likewise needless Viet Nam conflict, along with millions of that country's People.
  • Secrecy enables the label of War to be applied to belligerent U.S. actions unsupported by any legal Declaration of War, the lack of which renders all such actions War Crimes...the list of which is too long to discuss here.
  • Secrecy has acted as cover for acts of Terror against those on that list, against the People there and their governments, thereby sponsoring and exporting Terrorism, usually under the Stars and Stripes, no matter at all what you call it.
  • Secrecy has made our country hated, feared and ridiculed for the most revolting, compelling reasons, in almost every corner of our little Globe, the opposite of security.
  • Secrecy is also the opposite, the amputation of intelligence.
  • Secrecy gets the American Revolutionary TIP (Turd in Punchbowl) Award as a kind of life-time achievement prize...for all of History.
     If you have the least doubt about any of the foregoing, you'll need to ask someone who knows something.  I'm glad to say there are plenty more out here who feel just this way.


Intelligence

     Congratulations.  If you're reading this, you're already a member of the only species in the known universe with a word for intelligence, or the need for one.  This need is expressed in many ways, most obviously by this word's incessant presence in Modern Life.  Few terms in any language experience the flogging and bogging, the many hard miles over hard terrain that our word intelligence gets, daily.  It sounds like we're as smart as we can get and getting smarter by the minute, to hear us tell it.  Is it so?
     A while back, cleaning his paddock with my younger brother, Scott, we had an amusing exchange about smarts.  He was aware I usually avoid horses for the same reasons I'm not drawn to crowds of Humans.  Horses and people are similar in that if there's anything worse than a dumb one -- and Lordy, do they know dumb -- it's an 'intelligent' one.  Stay clear of 'em, I say.  He told me this, about an endurance ride he'd competed in:  An off-course turn took him and his mount up a very narrow trail, cliffs up on the left, down on the right, leaving no room to dismount or make a mounted u-turn.  Rounding a bend, they were blocked by a tree down over the trail, hanging precarious.  Scott said after a very few minutes of, 'Now what...,' and swiveling ears, the horse did something unhorselike.  He stood up on his back feet with Scott aboard, turned around in the trail, and went back to all fours headed safer back downhill.  Scott said, 'Tell me they're not intelligent,' speaking for his horses.  I said, 'Yeah.  And likewise, just because you can pronounce the word intelligence does not mean you have some, or would know where to find any, or would recognize it if it served you at McDonald's.'  We laughed.
     It's our very Distinguishing Characteristic, which no one seems to think is funny.  Look around you anywhere; distinguished?  How?  Where?
     There's a positive overdose blizzard of chaff marked 'intelligence,' and little more in evidence behind the label.  Distinguished by what, 'we-need-a-flood-of-good-clean-ideas-and-here-comes-a-smarts-drought?'  Tried to think and nothing happened?  Bushels of intelligence and most of it 'secret?'  This is an intelligence apparatus made almost entirely of open circuits, with not a glimmer at the bulb or a quiver on the needle.
     While you look around for some positive evidence of intelligence at work in your world, consider this:  Everyone (EVERYBODY) knows the words politician and crook are almost synonymous, near interchangeable, for very good and very old reasons.  Yet, a good number of otherwise normal-looking People, when elections creep up and campaigns start flinging 'product,' will actually engage in long, bitter arguments, debating back and forth, but seriously, which of the lying, thieving, murdering dogs among the candidates is the more believable.  Seriously.  Slim pickin's in the smarts department around election time, no doubt whatever.  Maybe in November, the smarter cells are hibernating, leaving the rest to sort among the evils for a 'lesser?'
     Intelligence is so highly valued, and so often-cited a factor in skills for survival (to hear the survivors tell it), you'd think there'd be more visible exercise of it.  Maybe we shouldn't expect so much.  We've got by on so little, so far so good, right?  Right?
     And the Official Intelligence Expert with an entire briefcase full of Intelligence does not have to show you anything, because you're just a cannon-fodder corrections-grist tax-cattle civilian mooing about intelligence and you don't even have a security clearance.  And more often than not, the briefcase holds only an underwear change, a few viagra, some outdated but hopeful condoms, and some worn porn.  A walking intelligence bonanza.  With a real, live Rolex.  It's too bleak to speak.
     If you're all hopeful, convinced that some real intelligence needs to spring forth to our rescue, beware: intelligence hasn't really played that big a role positively, so far.  And there are many things labeled 'intelligence' and convincingly packaged and all...that open up empty, or worse.  A spontaneous taxyak upwising seems unlikely...
     Ask an intelligence expert for examples of smarts operating successfully as a survival mechanism, and you'll find you're in the wrong building, Elvis.  The densest, most industrial-strength concentrations of deliberate ignorance and intentional stupidity are consistently exhibited by those known as intelligence experts.  We've come a long way, baby, on this brand of intelligence.  So does it look like it's going well?  Ask SETI, maybe.
     Succeeding in your quest for intelligence, like any other search, depends largely on where you look.  The official Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is looking everywhere but this planet in accord with their title.  Does that mean they've given up looking around here?  What, exactly, are their search parameters?  Would they know intelligence in the highly unlikely event they should run across it?  If they were to find intelligence out there, would SETI's response be the same as the intelligent response?
     Here on terra infirma we've a vast surplus of those who claim the gift of intelligence.  Some of these are documented with degrees, diplomas, citations, clearances, folksy memoirs, and more; others simply proclaim their smarts all unabashed, and recognize no intelligence whatever in those who disagree with them in this or any question.  (The old 'I'm smart, and you're not' deal that used to whirl across the schoolyard leaving a whiff of idiocy in its wake.)  Both these categories, claimants to be entitled, 'intelligent,' seem unmotivated to practice any of their art but bragging about it.  Long intel-drought there, too.
     There are legions of those in official capacity who claim possession of intelligence in two ways, for starters:
     1.  A claim of intelligence as a personal faculty with which they are blessed as individuals, having it in their possession and control, they say, with charts.
     2.  A claim of proprietary rights to way too much unspecified intelligence -- rights not found in Law -- including spurious rights to hide intelligence, or classify it.
     Why would a sworn and well-fed public servant want to hide important information by classification?
     Good intelligence or Bad intelligence, wouldn't it serve the Public, US, better to be wised up?  Isn't that kind of like the democratic approach?
   Whose Little Intel Is This?
A Quiz 
     Questions:
  •      Who's PAYING for this intelligence, and paying and paying and...?
  •      Whose security is supposed to depend on this intelligence, emphatically?
  •      Who gets selected NOT to take part in this intelligence 'for their own good,' unless it goes bad (unclassified), uncovering the rot, the crimes, the lives ruined and lost and stolen?  Time.  After.  Time.
  •      Who gets to clean up this horror?
  •      Who gets to pay again and pay again, and so on...?
  •      Who never gives themselves credit where they won it?
  •      Who takes a screwin' and keeps on mooin'?
     Answers:
          Us, us, us, us, us, us, and us, respectively

     Long time lucky thing for us self-appointed intelligent beings, thanks to Murphy and to God and all her little Helpers, there's way more to this smarts deal than you would think. 

Suggested Reading

Conspiracy for Empire; Big Business, Corruption, and the Politics of Imperialism in America, 1876-1907
     --  Luzviminda Bartolome Francisco, Jonathan Shepard Fast

Theodore Rex
     --  Edmund Morris

War Is A Racket
     --  General Smedley D. Butler

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
     --  Amin Maalouf

Seven Pillars of Wisdom
     --  T. E. Lawrence

Confession of an Economic Hit Man
     --  John Perkins

The Control of Nature
     --  John McPhee

Damn and Other Disasters; A Century of the Army Corps of Engineers in Civil Works
     --  Arthur E. Morgan

Tiananmen Diary
     --  Harrison E. Salisbury

Heaven's Breath; A Natural History of the Wind
     --  Lyall Watson