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The Cost of the War on Terrorism
Comments
So a new conspiracy 'theory' can always be baked up.
Its not anyone's fault, I mean I understand everyone believes what they believe. I think I was frustrated. I was teasing.
I knew full well that it wouldn't silence anyone. Perhaps I was winding Guy up. :rarr:
I understand your frustration, but just as they can say whatever they believe, and stick to it, so can you.
Sometimes, in the middle of a ranting, responsive post, I read it over again and realize that all I am doing is transferring a lot of aggression over. A lot of times, I will delete half of or all of what I would say and just let it go. My opinion is but one in a sea. Sometimes, I realize that I was wrong.
1:22 - All I see is an explosion.
If I think of it I will look into the truth moment video. Right now I am chilling with my coffee and couldn't get into something like that :coffee:
Whatever our opinions are about this subject I think it is important to maintain balance. It's a very heavy subject and it is all too easy to carry the weight of the world's problems on our shoulders. I am so grateful for Buddhism because it allows me to not get heated or depressed about it whereas if I didn't have some sort of spiritual grounding I might let it bring me down.
Metta,
Guy
I thought you might 'dig' Robert Anton Wilson and Hagbard.
"Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage," Celine went on. "In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom—in anarchy—such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor—raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is—and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws—the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side—are slightly different; that's all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us," he concluded, strongly emphasizing the last clause, staring at Drake, not at the professor."
"We have never sought power. We have sought to disperse power, to set men and women free. That really means: to help them to discover that they are free. Everybody's free. The slave is free. The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences. 'Fear is failure.' 'The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.' "Thou hast no right but to do thy will.' The goose can break the bottle at any second. Socrates took the hemlock to prove it. Jesus went to the cross to prove it. It's in all history, all myth, all poetry. It's right out in the open all the time."
'More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason—or are manipulated into reasoning—that entire entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted."
I know that humans are notorious for finding patterns in things; we like to assign a cause to an effect, even if we have no firm evidence of such causal relationship. I have noticed a correlation between the events that have taken place after 9-11 and the goals of The Project for a New American Century (recorded prior to 9-11). Do your own research and come to your own conclusions (you won't ever know with 100% certainty). Keep in mind that the past doesn't represent what we will see in the future, but it does show us the depth of human depravity reached through sheer greed and a complete disregard for life in general.
This conspiracy reminds me a lot of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Just about a month ago I watched an extremely well done documentary that presented all the significant conspiracies about that assassination, and refuted the points one by one. I was particularly impressed by new computer technology that showed one the key claims -- about the angle of the bullet -- was actually perfectly explained by Oswald as the sole shooter.
Now, I know that those who believe in those conspiracies will continue to believe. And, I am still convinced we don't know everything. But, then again, we don't know everything about almost anything. Heck, we don't know everything about Siddhartha. Yet we believe in his basic history.
And, I'm not even saying that there are no conspiracies. There are. But I don't believe some obscure guy (often with a cause) who simply wants to put forth his version of what could have happened.