I'm reading a book right now about Bush 2's White House staff that took control after 9/11.  I normally don't care for the details of political game playing, but it's interesting seeing how long some of those people have been around.  Presidents come and go, staff lingers on for decades in one capacity or another.  Something the American people don't seem to notice.  I keep telling people that presidents are just puppets, just a means to an end, just a conduit for the real action, just a poster person for the public, but I don't see very many other people saying that.  Running into a real book about it was pretty cool.  I liked Bush 2, but I said way back that he was stuck with circumstances and being hustled into things that went against the grain of his beliefs, BUT, if you really step back and look at the bigger picture, Republicans were headed down the same road as Democrats a long time ago.  Finding out that both were represented in the exclusive Bilderberger group (the Trilateral Commission) was a tad shocking, but not really surprising.  The second I found out Condoleezza Rice is a member (List of Bilderberg participants), I realized we're ON the road to Big Brother, not just wavering on and off as Republicans and Democrats wrest power from one another.  And this is now the cry that is going up, that Republicans were doing it after all, but the Democrats are just doing it faster.

 

There are big movements around the world to "kill capitalism" (that's actually what they call it), because (and I agree with this part) big corporations are out of control.  BUT.  In a global economy, world trade, and billions of people, you need global corporations.  OR, you need big government.  One or the other, I think they're both evil.  I'm all for free market.  But I have thought about this for a long time, and I don't see how free market can exist in a global economy, except in local pockets, and local pockets find ways to exempt themselves from regulation and taxation, so governments find ways to make local trade a criminal activity until it can be controlled.  There is the illusion of free market systems, of course, but in order to control runaway power, someone has to BE the power.  We've seen runaway power happen in monopolies and oligarchies, mafias and triads, scams of all kinds, and especially covert terrorist groups, and by saying this I also include any country that suffers bombings and killings based on belief systems, so this also includes militant Christians and blacks, not just Muslim jihadists.

 

There is great big stuff going on 'out there'.  Thankfully it's not in my street or neighborhood, but it's been happening in real life to millions of people for centuries, for millennia.  I was a child when I heard news stories about people trying to escape across Russian borders, the Berlin wall, Chinese poverty (cannibalism was legal in China when I was a child), Israeli-Jordan border skirmishes, and of course, the Viet Nam war was a never ending news story.  The kids growing up now don't see this stuff, they are shielded from terrible things by parents, by censoring, by entire channels that never show world news or talk about what is going on out there.  Millions of U.S. citizens are so spared of these images that they can't even imagine what life must be like without a convenience store up the street, without phones and a refrigerator, much less without half their town being under massacre.  I remember the very first al-Qaeda transmission of a U.S. citizen taken prisoner and having his head sawn off, and that transmission was so shocking that they were halfway done before anyone regained their senses enough to yank it off the air.  And ever since then, all al-Qaeda transmissions have been screened, we don't see this stuff.

 

I don't know why I'm writing all this.  I guess it's just irking me that we're so distracted with the whole Letterman-Palin thing.  Whose kid ~hasn't~ been dissed by other parents in a high school gym during a sporting event?  Geez.  Letterman won, his ratings spiked during the whole new Letterman vs. Conan stuff, and people still don't get it.  If I'd been Sarah Palin and the press was all over me about how I feel about my kid being joked about like that, I'd just laugh and shut the door.  Responding to silly crap only gives your opponent more power.  I liked Letterman years ago, but he's not an icon in my house (neither is Conan), and I have a life.  People jumping on both sides of the fight over this were ridiculous.  You know why we do this?...

 

The majority of U.S. citizens no longer know what evil is because we don't SEE evil.  I'll make an exception for the severely abused and those who are kidnapped for human trafficking, and I've seen how a drug war in a big city goes down with my own eyes.  Most of this stuff is done so quietly that we never blink an eye.  Someone's missing, oh, that's too bad, and we go on.  No one is bombing our favorite store or shattering glass up and down our street.  And I'm not advocating that, make no mistake.  But by censoring our worldwide news to the point where we find a little live blood too distasteful to be bothered with during our evening meal, then WE have become sick, sick people.  We should be outraged.  Well, we are, we're outraged that it wasn't censored...  So we turn on people like Letterman instead.  And he gets paid even more money over all the attention he's getting.  Have we learned ~nothing~?  The biggest book deals come out of the most ridiculous controversies, et al.

 

I have no idea what to do about any of this.  All I know is that I'm watching all this stuff and just shaking my head.  Do we *want* to remain blissfully ignorant?  Good and evil is more clearly demarcated in cartoons children watch, I just don't get what's wrong with the adults.