Lies, lies, lies
Ever notice how nearly all newspapers divide their pages into sections? Those are business, these are sports, etc.
This is done to prevent people from connecting the dots to see how these sectors interact amid our precious and increasingly precocious global reality. Indeed, sport is a global confluence of businessmen and high-flyers, including the stars and their subsequent air miles.
This is complicated by the fact that our globally connected “info-structure” allows idiots anywhere to post a video that goes viral, inspiring hatred and destruction, which I dislike.
And I wish that all these fools who are destroying their own country’s economies, in say Syria, would put down their guns, and learn Psy’s Gangnam Style dance instead.
Elsewhere, the bullet-makers, who owned the press and convinced the US to get involved in World War I, already have the politicians in their pockets, but the true cause of the war is that one historically insignificant guy was killed by a guy of equal or lesser stature in a “royalty issue spat,” which would be largely mocked by today’s tabloid press.
Since then, the war machine has been raging. I blame US president Nixon for many things, especially because he had no backbone for standing up to the CIA, which at the time was meddling in the affairs of other sovereign nations and historically causing lots of harm, chaos and instability in countries with democratically elected leaders. Thanks, US.
Later, the bullet-makers got together privately in a top-floor Seoul conference room near a red-light alley. One of them said “Hey, what if we had perpetual war? You know, constant violence around the world? Stakeholders be damned — stockholders will get rich!” and all the others immediately agreed. And that explains where we are today.
Where the brilliant comic and film The Matrix comes in is best described by Agent Smith, who complained about “the stench.”
We humans are quite a dirty species overall. Moreover, I’m really not into all this “human exceptionalism” vis-a-vis the animals we eat — leave sharks alone.
When people are limited to the news they can watch and the information they can gather, people in many places get harshly skewed advice, without a global perspective, increasingly from their news stations, school textbooks and places of worship.
Getting back to the war machine and malinvestment, how many times have any of the superpowers shot missiles at each other, ever, in history? Hmm. I guess that would be zero, and I was in my teens during Reagan.
Pumping more resources into military spending, though creating lots of jobs for any country which chooses this path, is surely the most unsustainable global bubble of all time.
As you read this, there are hundreds of thousands of missiles aimed at all kinds of places, rusting away, all around the world. The “capability” pretense is absurd.
Imagine a shareholders’ meeting: “Mr CEO, I have a question. We sold all these missiles to the government, but they’ve never been used. How do we even know if they work?” and the CEO says: “Relax, our stock price is stable.”
Torch Pratt
New Taipei City
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