Greed and the Rumba Line

Sorting through all of the information, dis-information, lies, obfuscations and specious assertions, one might never know 'WHO' pulls the strings in this world. Labeling 'THEM' Bilderbergers, CFA, NSA, Tri-lats, WMF or the Illuminated Seers of Bavaria, only allows the mind to focus for awhile on the problem. The problem is as old as humanity, one of the Cardinal sins - Greed. Greed for power and money to be exact; the other sins, Pride, Sloth, Envy, etc, all follow in a demonic rumba line to Greed.

Perhaps the most important precept to keep in mind is the dictum made by 'Deep Throat' to Woodward and Bernstein - 'Follow the Money'. For it is the adoration of money and the power it buys that has brought us to this condition. I know that is a very simplistic assessment. It is a 'thumbnail'. The 'elevator pitch'.

My intention here has not been to demonize Bush or any of his administration. They are not demons. They are ruthless, greedy men who should be held accountable for their actions the same as any other criminal. For what they have perpetrated are crimes against the Constitution of the United States, the American People and the World. Impeachment is one legal process by which we call an elected governmental servant of the people to accounts. The unelected members of his cabinet should also be indicted and prosecuted by the World Court just as Milosevic and other war criminals have been.

I understand fully that impeachments and indictments will not solve the problems of the world, no more than prosecuting murderers and rapists will end murder or sexual assault. As a country founded on the rule of law, impeachment, indictment and prosecution are the tools that we have allowed ourselves to utilize to keep in check those who would illegally serve themselves to the detriment of the greater good.

I feel as many do: I fear for our country. I fear that we may have lost our constitutional republic except as a formality of hollow rituals and meaningless elections. As Mayer Amschel Rothschild said "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."

That is the heart of the matter. Our nation has devolved into a corporate fascism: corporatism. It's not as heinous as the brand of fascism witnessed in Germany or Italy. It is a kinder, gentler form of fascism that allows its subjects to go about the business of making a comfortable life for themselves but only within certain prescribed parameters by which the rulers, the corporate managers will benefit. Democratic self-rule, government by the people is off the agenda except as a sop to keep the people pacified.

Whether, Johnny Mac, Hillary the Pill or Barack O'Mama gets elected, they will be ham-strung by all of the concessions and deals and compromises they have already made to the corporate managers in exchange for the millions in their campaign war chests.

The War in Iraq was a series of monumental blunders brought about by greed and hubris with horrendous, far-reaching consequences. Anyone who cannot accept that is being willfully blind. It may well bring about the unraveling of the American Empire and the near collapse of the economy. McCain and ‘more of the same’ of the past 8 years is not what I would prefer for the USA. Whether Hillary or Obama can set some things to right is a question I hope both of them will have a chance to answer to our satisfaction.

As black as that vision is, I do have faith. Not in Divine Intervention or the Second Coming. I have faith in the spiritual evolution of humanity. The spirit I refer to is that by which each of us can look beyond our petty desires and see and fell empathy with the great family of Man. Like any faith, it is constantly being tested.

Dubya's Re-surgitation

Well, now that is a really good one, Georgie. Even the most audacious lies will serve the cause. Here is Dubya laying out the recent up-tick in violence in Iraq in plain terms for us:

President Bush: “This offensive builds on the security gains of the surge and demonstrates to the Iraqi people that their government is committed to protecting them.”

By killing them, but that’s beside the point, I guess.

Last week, before the Medhi Army of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ended its unilateral cease-fire, Bush told us the surge was working because violence (or deaths from violence) was down by 50%. (As Patrick Cockburn, Iraq correspondent for the London Independent said on Democracy Now! last night,"50% of a bloodbath is still a bloodbath.")

Now, we’re expected to believe that the surge is working precisely because of the recent increase in hostile military actions in Basra and Baghdad and elsewhere. Evidently, despite the cease-fire, Medhi militiamen were targeted for attack by US supported Iraqi forces. Now they're shooting back and firing mortars into what was formerly known as 'the Green Zone'.

The Prez went on to say:

President Bush: "There is a strong commitment by the central government of Iraq to say that no one is above the law. "

Other than the USA, Israel , Blackwater, Halliburton, KBR and other select friends, of course.

A side note: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is trying to be nice - in the midst of a bloody crack-down - saying he would extend a deadline for Mahdi fighters to lay down their arms until April 8^th. (Let’s not all laugh at once.)

Then Bush gave us yet another caveat, lest we begin to hallucinate a light at the end of the tunnel.

President Bush: This operation is going to take some time to complete. And the enemy, you know, will try to fill the TV screens with violence. But the ultimate result will be this: terrorists and extremists in Iraq will know they have no place in a free and democratic society."

I don’t suppose there’s any real need to point out that there were no terrorists or extremist in Iraq before the illegal US invasion in 2003. Other than Saddam, his two demonic progeny and their henchmen, all of whom benefited in the most vulgar degree from the largess and friendship of St Ronnie, the Communicator’, Rummy ‘the in-fighter’ and everyone’s favorite Dick way back before Saddam left his back yard without permission for some mischief in Kuwait, that is.

Perhaps, though, I might just attempt to assert that those that the Dubya Administration and others call ‘terrorists and extremists’ would actually have legitimate recourse to rectify social and political conditions unfavorable to their community if they actually lived in a ‘free and democratic society’. Some might see that as ‘putting the cart before the horse’. I see it more as ‘the chicken and the egg’.

Of course, as VP Dick made clear last week, my opinion, like those of any other American, doesn’t matter a whit. What matters is what they in Bush the Younger's Administration think and what they want us to believe.

Up is down. Black is white. Might makes Right. The Surge is working.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/28/headlines

The Red, White and Blue Surge

“The ‘Surge’ is working.”

It’s the abracadabra mantra of the Bush administration and its adherents. If they say it often enough, they expect we’ll believe them. It’s a tactic that worked well enough for them when they chanted ‘WMDs’ leading up to the war. We can’t blame them for trying. (But we can try them for lying.)

What amazes is the brazen, unabashed arrogance by which they make this specious, perfidious declamation. The most disturbing example of this comes from everybody’s favorite ‘Dick’, the vice-president, Mr Cheney. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Martha Raddatz on ABC’s Good Morning America:

Cheney: “On the security front, I think there’s a general consensus that we’ve made major progress, that the surge has worked. That’s been a major success.”

Raddatz: “Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.”

Cheney: “So?”

Raddatz: “So? You don’t care what the American people think?”

Cheney: “No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Funny, maybe I’m being naïve but I’ve been under the impression that the United States of America was a representational democratic republic; ‘of the people by the people for the people’ and all that. Here’s the VP of the nation stating on a national television broadcast that the voice of the people is not something he or the administration needs to heed.

Let’s give ol’ Dick the benefit of the doubt and check what the American people have to say.

According to the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted between March 14 and March 16, 66% of Americans oppose the war in Iraq.

During roughly the same time period, 59% of respondents in a CBS News poll said they felt the US should have stayed out of Iraq and 65% disapproved of Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll taken between Feb. 28 and March 2, 2008 found that 63% felt the war was not worth fighting.

According to the Pew Research Center survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International Feb. 20-24, 2008, 54% think the U.S. made the wrong decision in using military force against Iraq.

(There may well be polls that found substantial support for the war in Iraq - the student body at Pat Robertson’s Regent University, for instance – but I discovered none.)

Note that these polls were taken after the Bush apparatchiks had been chanting the mantra for months in news reports, press conferences, interviews and the like. Apparently, the majority of the US public polled had not been swayed.

Regardless of the polls, the VP says, “So?”

In a speech given at the Pentagon to mark the fifth anniversary of the illegal US invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq, Dub-ya proclaimed that the US is safer after its invasion of Iraq, adding that the troop 'surge' had succeeded in promoting stability there. "Because we acted the world is better and the United States of America is safer. Because of the troop surge, the level of violence is significantly down. Civilian deaths are down. Sectarian killings are down. Attacks on American forces are down.”

Pardon me, Mr Bush, but are you smoking jimson weed? What bizarro-world are you using as a benchmark if you consider the world and the United States a better, safer place since the invasion? Maybe you should ‘follow your bliss’, don a uniform and stand on the front lines before you spew such nonsense. (ref: this blog, March 17, 2008 ‘Irony #2’) Or how about taking a nice stroll outside the ‘Green Zone’ without a security detachment to discover for yourself how safe the world is for US citizens? Might I suggest Fallujah, Karbala or Tikrit?

Just as detached from reality is Dubya wanna-be, John McCain. Johnny Mac was in London trying on the ‘president’s new clothes’ and sizing up Gordon Brown for a dog collar when he offered his own syntactically fractured version of the party line.”We are now succeeding in Iraq and Americans, at least, I believe, are in significant numbers agreeing that the present strategy of the Surge is succeeding.”

Better check the polls, Mr Candidate.

100 more years. 100 more years.

To be fair, arrogant delusions about this ghastly conflict are not limited to the Neo-cons and Republicans. On the stump in Detroit, Senator Hillary Clinton, outlining her plan to draw down troop levels in Iraq said “… the Iraqi government has to take responsibility for its own future. We have given them the precious gift of freedom and it is up to them to decide whether or not they will use it." (Italics are mine.)

“We have given them the precious gift of freedom…”

Talk about arrogance. One can imagine an Iraqi widow wondering what the return policy is on such a blood-soaked gift.

"When you have at least 200 Iraqis dying every month in attacks on a per capita equivalent ... I don't know how anyone can characterise that as a success.” Hady Amr, a Middle East analyst at the Brookings Institution in Doha, Qatar, told Al Jazeera that the US-led invasion of Iraq was a strategic disaster. Mr Amr said: “The US took a country that had a lot of problems, a totalitarian state, and turned it into a haven for terrorism."

So, by what criteria is the ‘Surge’ working? Granted, the total number of fatal attacks against ‘Coalition Forces’ and sectarian violence is down from the disastrous highs of 2006 and 2007. Much of this reduction of violence, however, is due to the Mehdi Army cease-fire called by Muqtada al-Sadr last August, though that substantial fact is seldom mentioned in the corporate media and only in passing, never fully investigating the implications.

How could any rational individual call a return to the bloody, black days of 2005 ‘progress’? One must assume that the present level of slaughter, mayhem and atrocity is acceptable to the Bushites as long as they breathe deeply and keep chanting.

The ‘Surge’ is working.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/20/headlines

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/20/iraq.main/

http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm

The Daily Show video: Iraq , the First Five Years

The Road to Hell

Let’s begin with a parable; the parable of ‘the boy, the bird and the stone’.

A small child throws a stone and kills a songbird. The child might not have intended to kill the bird; perhaps he meant only to chase it away or practice his throwing arm. Whatever the intent, whatever the boy’s motive, the bird remains dead. The Audubon Society would care nothing about the child’s motives. And neither would the bird.

The Brookings institution is a well-known Washington think-tank upon which many administrations of the US government have depended for non-partisan research for almost a century. Kenneth M. Pollack is the Director of Research at the Brookings Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He is an expert on national security, military affairs and the Persian Gulf, was Director for Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council and spent seven years in the CIA as a Persian Gulf military analyst.

In an article posted on the Brookings website on March 16, 2008, Mr Pollack had this to say:
“If we leave behind a raging civil war in which the Iraqi people are incomprehensibly worse off than they had been under Saddam Hussein and the Middle East more threatened by the chaos spilling over from Iraq than they ever were by the dictator’s arms, then no one will care how well-intentioned our motives.”

How well-intentioned our motives? Motives?

Mr Pollack, with all due respect, please re-read your statement. Note the words “…a raging civil war in which the Iraqi people are incomprehensibly worse off than they had been under Saddam Hussein…” and the part where you say “and the Middle East more threatened by the chaos spilling over from Iraq than they ever were by the dictator’s arms…”.

If that is a proper assessment of the situation in Iraq – and I think that it is, with little room for disagreement – what does it matter what our motives were?

A recent World Health Organisation report estimated that 151,000 civilian Iraqi men, women and children were killed between March 20, 2003 and June 2006. The estimated number of civilian Iraqis killed by violence in 2007 is in the neighborhood of 22,000 to 24,000 according to Iraq Body Count, a British firm dedicated to making this grim tally. Do you expect the surviving family members of the 175,000 Iraqis killed as a result of American foreign policy to care a whit about the motives of the US?

Neither the Brookings Institution, the Pentagon nor even the Red Cross/Red Crescent, to my knowledge, have offered an estimate of the number of Iraqi men, women and children wounded since the onset of the invasion. (Here’s quite the party killing parlor game: Pick a number. Twice those killed? Three times the number killed? Four times? A factor of 10?) What do the wounded and suffering care if our intentions were well-meant?

The ICRC states “five years after the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world. Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. The current crisis is exacerbated by the lasting effects of previous armed conflicts and years of economic sanctions.” The once developing nation of Iraq has been reduced to the dire, retched state of one of the poorest third world countries. Will the children dying of thirst and dysentery in the shell of a bombed out neighborhood clinic pause to weigh the pros and cons of our intentions?

Please, Mr Pollack, tell me what had the Bush administration intended when they rail-roaded the US Congress and the American people into this illegal war? The term ‘well-intentioned motive’ does not spring to my mind. ‘War profiteering’ does and that’s a matter that should be discussed along with war crimes and war reparations, but let’s leave that for another time.

To his credit, Mr Pollack has belatedly seen the light. Or at least, he’s caught a glimpse, for he goes on with this carefully worded under-statement, “…what I most wish I had understood before the invasion was the reckless arrogance of the Bush administration.” He then calls the Bush administration’s handling of the war “clumsy, careless and rash”. Clearly, Mr Pollack now thinks, like the majority of Americans, that waging war in Iraq was a blunder.

Better late than never?

Now, presumably, he and his fellow Saban Center intellectuals will spend months or years ciphering the tactics, strategies and operations to deduce where the fatal errors lay that lead to yet another less-than-successful, though valiant American crusade to bring the gift of freedom and democracy to an oppressed people.

Better luck next time?

The greater issue Mr Pollack and most of his profession seem blissfully oblivious to, however, is precisely the one which should be triggering red flag alerts and setting off klaxons and sirens of warning. Most of the rest of the world is aware of it. Much of the world resents it. Some of the world hates us for it. Some hate it enough to fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up in crowded markets to express their resentment and hatred for it. The issue referred to is not ‘our love of freedom’. It is not ‘our noble vision of a democratic world’. It is not our magnanimity, our wealth, our life-style, our sports heroes, our films or our music. The issue that gets under the skin of the rest of the world is the self-deluded, self-righteous, self-serving credo that the government of the US, while capable of the most egregious acts, is nevertheless motivated by only the most high-minded of intentions and ipso facto should be excused for its various transgressions.

(‘Transagressions’ is the euphemism that would be preferred in polite company. To come closer to the truth as understood by much of the rest of the world, transgressions should be read as ‘crimes against humanity’. Anyone with a shred of moral integrity need only recall Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti and Panama for past examples of such ‘transgressions’. )

It is said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” That might be, but the larger paving stones on the road to hell are undoubtedly greed, murder, torture, corruption and hubris.

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2008/0316_iraq_pollack.aspx

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS22537.pdf

http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/iraq-report-170308

McCain & Cheney in ‘the Zone’

The inimitable, legendary vaudeville tap-dance duo, McCain & Cheney made a surprise visit to Baghdad this week. John McCain, dubbed ‘the brash one’ quipped, “We’re here to kick up our heels to salute the troops.”Not to be out-done, ’Dick’ Cheney, the spry, younger member, waxed, “A little terpsichorean dalliance is just what the grunts need. If only Bob Hope were here.” And he wiped away a tear.

The veteran hoofers will be in the Green Zone all week. Be kind to your waitresses and try the veal.

In other news, it was revealed that Bob Hope was successfully cloned several years before he passed. It was further announced that more than 30 cloned ‘Hopes’ will be available in the next decade to begin entertaining US troops at the more than 700 US military bases in more than 90 countries around the world.
“It’s uncanny.” said the lead technician on the heretofore secret project, “Each of the clones has the same, brilliant comic delivery as the original Hope. And a golf club, besides.” The next phase of the project is the cloning of Joey Heatherton, Jill St John and Anita Ekberg.

“Thanks for the mammaries”?

In reality, Republican presidential hopeful, John McCain reportedly insisted his visit to Iraq was a fact-finding venture, not a campaign photo opportunity.

Yeah, pull the other one.

Want facts, John? Here are some to gnaw on:

The PBS documentary from 2004 ‘Private Warriors’ presented this fact: 6 months before the US invaded Iraq, former Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, were already building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion. The commitment to an invasion of Iraq had been made and contractors hired to provide logistical support for an armed assault long before Bush and his administration got too far along in the litany of 900+ lies regarding WMDs and Al-Qaeda connections.

After searching through more than 600,000 documents Iraqi captured in 2003, the Pentagon has concluded that there was no "direct operational link" between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda.

Nevertheless, $12 billion in services were contracted from 2002 to 2005 to wage the war... uh... bring Democracy to the Iraqi people, that is.

In little more than a year, the New York Federal Reserve Bank made 21 shipments of currency to Iraq totaling $11,981,531,000. The Fed shipped 281 million individual banknotes, in bricks weighing a total of 363 tons to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Ultimately, $9 billion of the nearly $12 billion went missing.

Ooops! (Now, what’s this about a credit crisis?)

And check these killer bullet points, Johnny Mac!

• Nearly 4,000 dead Americans from hostile and non-hostile events
• 30,000 Americans wounded
• Upwards of 90,000 documented civilian Iraqis killed (or is that ‘liberated’?)
• 2 million Iraqis internally displaced (bureaucratese for ‘homeless’) due to violence
• More than two million refugees from Iraq have fled to neighboring countries
• The Iraq War is now costing US taxpayers almost $2 billion a week
• Total estimated cost of the war in Iraq? $3,000,000,000,000.00 (Yes, that’s $3 trillion.)

Enough facts for one visit, John?

How about another hundred years of facts like these?

Of course, the US will have gone broke long before it comes to that.

Meanwhile, everybody’s favorite ‘Dick’ – Cheney, that is - also dropped by the Green Zone to share the Bush administration’s delusional vision of prolonging “the campaign that liberated the people of Iraq from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, and launched them on the difficult but historic road to democracy." Cheney stated almost wistfully, “So, if you reflect back on those five years, I think it’s been a difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor and that we’ve come a long way in five years and that it’s been well worth the effort.”

No doubt he’s thinking of the billions reaped in no-bid, cost-plus contracts for his ol’ buds at Halliburton, KBR, et al.

http://ga3.org/campaign/Iraqi_refugees?gclid=CLvpktmFl5ICFQIaewodEn0R6g

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

http://www.motherjones.com/bush_war_timeline/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/09/28/cost_of_iraq_war_nearly_2b_a_week/

Irony #2

In a video conference last week, President Bush told U.S. troops in Afghanistan that he was: “a little envious” of them. Bush said: “If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed.” Bush went on to say: “It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks.”

Perhaps the President should step out of his neo-con fantasy and remember his own chance at personal involvement in ‘making history’.

It was 1968 and the war to defend Democracy against the communists in Vietnam was in full swing. It was the middle of the Tet Offensive. 16,511 US servicemen and women lost their lives ‘making history’ that year. Another 87,388 were wounded in 1968 in the effort to squelch nationalistic self-determination - otherwise known as stemming the tide of Communism in South-east Asia.

Dub-ya was just about to graduate from Yale like his daddy and granddaddy before him. (A legacy – meaning he didn’t have to earn it, just pay for it.) Knowing that he’d be eligible for the draft, did Georgie seek the ‘fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed”?

Not on your life!

He sought and found refuge in the shelter of his daddy’s political shadow, securing a safe, State-side billet with the Texas Air National Guard even though he tested in the 25^th percentile, the lowest possible passing grade.

It is widely known that Georgie was frequently AWOL from guard duty. By one account, he didn't report to his guard unit for 17 months and in order to help a family friend’s political campaign he tried to finagled a re-assignment to an Alabama Air National Guard unit which HAD NO PLANES. (Just as well for young Dubya as he had been grounded for failing to take his air fitness physical.)

In September of ’72, he was ordered to report to the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery, Alabama. Bushie says he did so, but his superiors say they never saw him. There's no documentation he ever showed up, and despite rewards offered to anyone who could come forth and testify that they actually saw Georgie on duty, not a single one of the nearly seven hundred soldiers then in the unit has stepped forward to corroborate Bush's story.

When Dub-ya decided to go to business school at Harvard in the fall of 1973, he requested and got an honorable discharge eight months before his service was scheduled to end.

Just goes to show: it’s not what you know but who you know.

Now, fast forward to the present and Bush as the Commander-in-Chief, who sends National Guardsmen to Iraq and Afghanistan for a “fantastic experience… on the front lines” has the effrontery, the brass-balled gall to state, “It must be exciting… in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger.”

Right.

Have you no shame, Mr President? Have you no sense of decency?

American servicemen and women deserve better than this.

The American people deserve better than this.

The world deserves better than this.

Impeach Bush and Cheney Now!

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/17/headlines

http://www.awolbush.com/

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030411.html

http://archive.democrats.com/display.cfm?id=166

p.s. Just for grins, check out Dub-ya’s Yale transcript (link below). We have a ‘D’ student for president! No wonder the country’s in the deep doo-doo.

http://2004.georgewbush.org/images/bios/transcript.jpg

Detecting Baloney

Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I do like conspiracy theories though, so it might be said that I am a fan of conspiracy theories without being a straight out fanatic about them.

What most intrigues me about conspiracy theories is the quest for knowledge and understanding exhibited by the theorists. It could be argued (and often is) that such quests are misguided, a waste of time and effort better spent on more ‘productive’ endeavors.

Who is to say? According to Professor Joseph Campbell in his study of comparative mythology, quests are not chosen but rather quests chose their ‘questers’. Campbell’s own quest was to discover and understand the links between the various myths of the world. Admiral Perry’s was to reach the Pole. Jake and Elwood’s was to save the orphanage. Whether great or small, grand or petty, quests are not to be ignored.

The source of the incentive, the drive to research and postulate theories about conspiracy is not solely a metaphysical one. Undoubtedly, there is an intellectual impetus to discover the truth about the world we inhabit. The search for truth is inherent in the postulations of conspiracy theorists.

The question must be asked: why are the postulators of conspiracy theories not satisfied with the accepted explanations given for enormously complicated event? Here is the nub that irritates many detractors. Why can’t conspiracy theorists accept at face value explanations such as the Warren Commission Report or the 9-11 Commission Report?

The answer to that query can easily be discerned if one reads over the arguments and examines the material presented by many conspiracy theorists. Whenever the generally accepted explanation of an event or phenomenon begs the question (whether it is regarding a terra-centric universe, WMDs or a ‘magic bullet’) there are questions which beg to be asked. In a conspiracy theorist’s postulation, one invariably finds a check list of questions about the event which have either gone unanswered, ignored, glossed or are answered in a less than satisfactory manner hence raising further questions. Here we find the same motivation that has initiated all of the great scientific discoveries and uncovered all of the scandals throughout history: the search for truth amid what are perceived as falsehoods and failing that, the search for acceptable answers.

Unfortunately, too often conspiracy theorists rely on specious arguments, tautology and emotionally driven thought processes rather than finely honed critical thought. (This is hardly over-stating the general situation.) Exacerbating the effect of these general deficiencies of argument, the fans of conspiracy theories too often accept these deficient arguments at face value. The result is well-known: the theorists and fans are roundly denounced as ‘crackpots’. Quite often this denunciation is deserved.

Nevertheless, points raised by conspiracy theorists challenging accepted explanations are very often thought provoking. These should not be brusquely dismissed as spurious even if in a many cases the points raised are very emotionally charged, taboo or politically unpopular. Interesting points should be examined and weighed critically for merit, substance and validity. Too often the treasure is tossed with the trash.

Here the failure to think critically is shared by theorists, fans and detractors.

So, in an effort to rectify that situation, here is a link to a crash course on critical thinking; Carl Sagan’s ‘Baloney Detection Kit’ as it was presented in his book,’The Demon-Haunted World’.

http://www.xenu.net/archive/baloney_detection.html

For a more complete treatment of the ‘Baloney Detection Kit’ by Michael Shermer and Pat Linse, here is a link to Skeptics.com where it can be purchased in a booklet form.

https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Session_ID=32c4c614bdb2fd78c08c0c84faa4e4c4&

The ability to detect baloney will well serve us all when we are presented with dubious information and explanations from our governmental representatives, corporate leaders, their agents and functionaries. Perhaps if more members of the US Congress and the citizens of the United States had learned to think critically, the US would not have been suckered into going to war in Iraq. Or Vietnam. Or Nicaragua. Or Guatemala. Or Haiti. Or Panama. Or Grenada. Perhaps the ability to think critically may even allow us to detect the baloney that is leading us into armed conflict with Iran.