A Lady Pole like feeling.

Sometimes, when I attempt to explain anything pertinent to our politics, I feel a bit like the character Lady Pole from the novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  Whenever she would try to explain to people about the harm caused to her by the evil faerie prince, she was compelled to speak a kind of gibberish instead. This was because of the spell the faerie had her in.

Outside the land on Faerie, and more specifically, in the United States of today - there are many possible reasons why our political discourse can turn into gibberish. These reasons range from the mundane to the incredible. By "incredible," I mean that which is often relegated to the realm of "conspiracy theory"

A simple reason we might be inclined towards political nonsense is because we are constantly exposed to political nonsense. Mass communications, often one-way communications (with the possible exception of the internet) fill our minds with fantasy. What has become the mass media, including television, radio, and the internet to some extent, assaults us with the greatest illogic  history has ever known.

So far, I have been speaking of the mundane, which should be fairly obvious to most. Moving beyond the mundane, into the realm of ideas often relegated to "conspiracy theory," there is much to consider.

Let's start with one that is a little less controversial. For decades, we have known about the potential for subliminal messages to alter thought and behavior. Some would say the potential is exaggerated. For instance, it has been claimed that for one to be motivated to buy a soda at the drive-in movie, one first had to be truly thirsty. And, there is some quibbling over how "subliminal" is really defined.  The above link makes the case that sometimes we mean "supraliminal" rather than "subliminal."

To move further into the realm of "conspiracy theory," There are allegations that, whether this counts as subliminal or not, the US government has technology to broadcast audio messages directly to a single individual.   In fact, here is a video that shows a private individual demonstrating the technology allowing him to do this very thing.

Of course, there is much more, and I haven't even mentioned things like MK Ultra and Project Mockingbird. There certainly are cases when fact is stranger than fiction, but at least it is still unlikely that one could be manipulated by a faerie prince.

Freedom of speech restricted in France?

Man claims he takes down his website because he is afraid of alleged new law limiting disagreement with the government. I tried his site out of curiosity and got a white screen only. Hmm...

The internet of things

The real question is why people have come to power that think this way?

Does TPP spell the demise of the internet as we know it?

Only time will tell. This is from CounterPunch.  It is hard to imagine that even Google and some of the big tech companies would be for some of the things in this deal. Perhaps they're not. time will tell, but if we take what is being reported at face value, especially in the article linked to above, it might become difficult to spread information throughout the internet as we can today. Who knows, it might be useless to link to articles, as copyright will be very much in the way. That's if we are still allowed to link to articles at all. On the other hand, the end of the internet has predicted by doomsayers many times before, and somehow, it survives. We'll have to wait and see if it survives this time. The problem is, the people with real power in this world don't like our freedom.

An example of the big brother nature of the internet

Many weird things have happened to me online, but I usually can't remember all of them at the same time. So, I'll go out there again (as that is what this blog has been about), and attempt to describe one such thing.

Once I had a different blogger blog where I sort of decided I was unhappy with some of the terms of use and copyright stuff Google goes on about. Silly on my part really anyway. So, I kind of blogged something, which I don't remember the particulars of, that was along the lines of saying I would sort of ignore all of this. Very silly on my part really.

Next time I logged in, maybe on the bottom of the blog (I don't remember), there was a message along the lines of, "you must accept the terms of service..."

Anybody who comes across this post would never believe me. But it is true. And this is mild compared to some of the other stuff.

Edward Snowden, backdoors, and imagining Germany

Ever since I started a blogspot blog several years ago, I have noticed that no matter what other stats might turn up, there was always exactly one view from Germany. Most people wouldn't think too much of this, and I don't really either.

Let's imagine for a moment (indulge me in a bit of fantastical speculation) that all (or even some particularly suspicious) blog traffic is routed through Germany. There it is tracked and even read, perhaps by a computer, and eventually if need be by a human. Let us say that in this fantastical world, there is a way for the entity in Germany to go into the blogger's computer and cause mischief.

Now, take out the part about Germany, and that seems to be what Edward Snowden was really telling us.

Other than the part about being able to cause mischief, I don't really care so much about the rest. Politics is public, and that is the point. We take stands, and make our views known publicly. States don't have to spy too much to figure out what those of us inclined towards politics think about issues of importance to us.

By the way, there could be something to the Germany part for all I know. This is a variation on the "big lie" idea. You know, if one tells a big lie people might be more inclined to believe it than a small lie, often attributed Goebbels I believe. My theory is more like the most outrageous explanation turns out to be what is really going on.

If one doesn't believe this was Snowden's message to us, here are some links:

Steve blank blog on NSA backdoor into computers

RT "Germany is nsa's primary host of surveillance..."  (Note: Irony. We now know that US even spied on PM Merkel.)

"a running list of what we know the nsa..."

teckdirt NSA planned to infect computers with malware

And believe me, there is much more.