Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Believe Me, You Idiots Are Really Gullible!

As you may recall, we've visited with WorldNetDaily columnist Mychal Massie before (here and here), but for some reason I went ahead and read his latest column anyway. Please don't judge me.


You know, Mychal, I've been getting "lies and distortion" fed to me my whole life, and not just via the media. One of my earliest memories involves sitting in a high chair in the breakfast nook as my mother gently pushed a spoon toward my mouth and cheerfully declared, "Here comes the choo-choo!" And you know what? It wasn't a train. It was never a train. It was always fucking applesauce. So I feel you, man.

Although looking back, I'm not sure why I was so excited about the prospect of eating a locomotive in the first place. I mean, it was only a few years later that I got my own Lionel Train Set, and I was never even tempted to eat the thing, although I did lick it once, just to see what would happen, and got a shock that made my hair break the surly bonds of its Butch Wax and stand on end.

Anyway.
A friend forwarded me a Wall Street Journal article on a study published in the March issue of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine pursuant to “the dubious science behind the anti-fat crusade.”
Ah yes, the pro-fat counter-crusade. In case you've been spared the right wing glee, the WSJ published an article by an author flogging her new book, in which she argues that we'd be less obese if we ate more lard.
The study validated what several of my friends and I have long believed
...that congealed bear grease makes an excellent dessert topping.

Mychal's friends evidently include a lot of professional and amateur wingnuts, since a quick Google search reveals the top sites jabbering about the WSJ piece include Power Line, Instapundit, freerepublic, and lucianne.com. In other words, people who'd just as soon you die now and decrease the surplus population, but who have a vested interest in portraying any kind of government regulation -- even dietary guidelines -- as the worst blow to civil rights since the Nuremberg Laws -- a kind of Kristallnacht at the Golden Corral.
This brings me to my point. People are gullible, and, the greater the desire to be viewed as knowledgeable, the greater the ease with which they buy into lies – lies that are agenda-driven by those seeking control of our lives.
Probably the most heinous example of agenda-driven people seeking to control our lives was Project MK-Ultra, which ran from the early 50s to the early 70s, and involved efforts by a collective of sustainable farms to control human behavior with doses of organic Mega Kale.
People would be willing to believe horse manure is the greatest facial cream ever if you package it in a “made from recycled materials” container and have some actress (who probably doesn’t know her ZIP code) paid a heap (pun intended) of money to seemingly smear it on her face at bedtime.
As a prediction I don't find this particularly impressive, since it pretty much happened twenty years ago:

I remember vividly the lies in the late 1970s and early 1980s which claimed that, due to global cooling, by 1990 we would witness environmental catastrophes of “biblical proportions.”
I actually don't remember this, but it must be true, because if there's one trait all scientists share, it's a tendency to use the Old Testament as a metric. Did it all the time in Ghostbusters.
We were told people were going to die, crops would fail to grow and food shortages would be rampant. Time magazine and other so-called respected publications ran major features that supported the lies. Suffice it to say, catastrophes never happened.
Catastrophes are like the Cottingley Fairies -- a hoax perpetrated by climate scientists and Edwardian school girls.  Take all those people stranded at the Superdome in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- a lot of people called that a catastrophe, when in fact it was just a Mad Max II: Beyond Thunderdome cos-play that got out of hand.
Then came Al Gore. While his foolish theocracy of man-made global warming has made him a very wealthy man, his fabricated myth is being dismissed by scientists near daily.
That hasn't stopped Ken Ham.
The most available, efficient and clean source of energy will, in all likelihood, never be utilized. Nuclear energy has been rendered verboten because of a movie, “The China Syndrome.”
Those who are seeking control of our lives may try to convince you it was the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island reactor (fun fact, the radioactive gasses produced by the accident were released the same year -- 1979 -- as The China Syndrome) that turned people off nuclear power.  Or the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe special event ("[The] explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe...The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers...During the accident itself 31 people died, and long-term effects such as cancers and deformities are still being accounted for"), or the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011, in which three of six reactors melted down, and which continues to prove how "clean" nuclear power is on a daily basis.

But no.  Those of us who aren't in thrall to the agenda-drivers know that it's really a 35-year old movie that's been controlling energy policy in this country, just as we realize that Georges Méliès's Voyage dans la Lune is the reason we've been shooting manned bullets at the moon since 1902.
And perhaps the greatest fabricated story in the annals of history is that of Barack Obama.
He's America's Imaginary Friend.
 But people are still near manic in idolizing a person about whom less is factually known than is known about the Old Testament priest Melchizedek. 
I hate those Melchizedek-bots at Firedoglake.
And to compound that, these same people still bow before his every word even though he has been proven to be a pernicious subverter of truth, time after time.
Look, Myc, I voted for Obama, but even I don't bow before his every word.  Granted, I'll genuflect when he says "shins," but when he says "rumpus," I only curtsey.
Within the past two weeks we witnessed the media savaging Cliven Bundy – including many in the so-called conservative media who turned on him like rabid dogs the moment he was accused (falsely, I might add) of being a racist.
Man...President Obama doesn't exist, Melchizedek the Priest-King of Salem doesn't exist. Even racism is a figment of Sean Hannity's febrile imagination. If shit gets any more unreal, I expect Laurence Fishburne to show up and offer me my choice of color-coded Contac cold capsules.
Regardless what truth ultimately is uncovered and revealed, Donald Sterling will always be a racist – when, in fact, if he is guilty of anything, it is poor judgment regarding the scheming little fortune hunter he became involved with. 
Mychal isn't a bigot, by the way; he doesn't hate all scheming little fortune hunters, just the uppity ones. He thinks some of them -- the good ones -- are hard workers, know their place, and don't whistle at white women on the street.
There was no mention of his First Amendment rights
Exactly. Why were our frostbitten forefathers dying by inches at Valley Forge, if not to protect the average billionaire-on-the-street from the consequences of a public relations faux pas?
...or the fact that whatever his personal opinions may be his players were treated like royalty, with his team having the fifth-highest payroll of all 30 NBA teams.
That doesn't mean he's a Kid Power-like rainbow of tolerance, it just means he's a bad negotiator, considering what a shitty team the Clippers are.
Millions of people receive brainwashing every evening vis-à-vis some news programming. 
So what else is new? I remember when I was a kid, and sometimes, after The Huntley-Brinkley Report, my dad would suggest we get out of the house, maybe head down to McDonald's for some food, folks, and fun, but my mom would always be a killjoy and say, "No, I just washed my brain and I can't do a thing with it."
And just as with the “dubious science” surrounding the anti-fat crusade, if something is said enough times and/or said by the equivalent of a nilpotent able to use a teleprompter without blinking, the lie becomes fact.
You call it "brainwashing," Roger Ailes calls it "a business plan."
People write me daily asking, “What can we do to save our nation?” My answer is always the same: “Trust God, not man – and stop believing the lies.” 
But don't trust Genesis 14, or Psalm 110, because that Melchizedek guy seems a little dodgy, and has never furnished his birth certificate or college transcripts.
The truly tragic part is that the people who embrace the lies are also the ones who viciously attack those who refuse to believe what they know to be untrue.
Well said.  Well...said, anyway.
The public is spoon fed lies and distortion every day on every level.
Remember: it's not a train!
 And yet the same lies and subterfuge continue to be believed. One can only conclude that people want to be deceived, and the deceivers are eager to oblige them.
So anyway, we can eat more saturated fat now. But that's just according to the Wall Street Journal, which is part of the lying, brainwashing media, so maybe split the difference? Fight the Power by having a big, thick steak, but still put I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! on your baked potato.

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or use the new product: "Bugger me ... it IS butter!"

Jimbo said...

I remember the Huntley-Brinkley Report but our family were CBS News people and so we watched Walter Crankcase. Also, H-B kind of reminded me of the Odd Couple: you had Marlboro Man along side of Mr. Intellectual Brinkley's weird slightly staccato delivery - short phrases delivered in an arch style that was completely different from Huntley's straightforward Montana rumble. Still it was just news though our local Pittsburgh news often did remind me a bit of "Anchorman".
World Net Daily is way too easy pickings for your excellent skewerings. C'mon, you need to give us better meat than this clown.

Carl said...

We were told people were going to die, crops would fail to grow and food shortages would be rampant. Time magazine and other so-called respected publications ran major features that supported the lies. Suffice it to say, catastrophes never happened.

♪ Do they know it's Christmas time at all? ♫

Remember that, moron?

Carl said...

People are gullible

Which I guess explains how Mychal a) got his job at WND¹ and b) believes somehow that spells the same name as Michael.

¹ Unless of course it was an affirmative action hire. Was it, Myk?

Chris Vosburg said...

Mychal (MITCHELL!) writes: I remember vividly the lies in the late 1970s and early 1980s which claimed that, due to global cooling, by 1990 we would witness environmental catastrophes of “biblical proportions.”

How bizarre. My best guess is that he is referring to the hypothetical threat of "nuclear winter" presented by setting off an exchange of dozens of nuclear weapons, which would result in hundreds of firestorms in cities, which would presumably release so much soot and ash into the atmosphere that sunlight would be obscured, thus having a global cooling effect.

Not that anybody'd be around to notice, having all died of radiation poisoning.

But nevertheless, it hasn't happened because we nuclear powers are keeping all our missiles in our silos, thank you very much, not because the science proved to be incorrect.

What a dumbass.

Kathy said...

I remember people in the late 70s screeching that there was going to be another ice-age any minute now! They were mostly conservatives, such as Jerry Pournelle and his chums.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

The Applesauce Holocaust is real, lieberals.
~

Keith said...

"Pearl Cream!" How could one resist after the enthusiastic endorsements from such lovely ladies as Mary Jean H., Sybil K, and Janet M. (from La Jolla, Kansas City, MO and Midland, MI, respectively). Tried it at home and broke out with facial shingles about a week later. Nancy Kwan, I hate you!

Doc Logan said...

Or use the new product: "Bugger me ... it IS butter!"

Just look for Maria Schneider's face on the label.

Carl said...

My best guess is that he is referring to the hypothetical threat of "nuclear winter" presented by setting off an exchange of dozens of nuclear weapons

No, Mychal's correct, actually. The consensus of opinion was that we were about due for another glaciation, based on some bloody average period between Ice Ages or some such nonsense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

We know better now.

Scott said...

No, Mychal's correct, actually

In a reversal most sportswriters and rhetoricians didn't expect, Mychal has just pulled even with the blind squirrel!

Chris Vosburg said...

I'll be damned, it was a thing, after all. Thanks for the link, Carl, but it's right there in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry:

Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, i.e., a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions.

So I'm not quite sure how you arrived at the conclusion that this was a "consensus."

As for myself, this wrinkle passed completely unnoticed, but then again, I was far too busy with sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, to my credit.

Carl said...

But there was a TIME Magazine cover story! Back when TIME covered the news!

I didn't say it was the general consensus, just that there was a significant portion of the scientific community that believed in it.

grouchomarxist said...

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."

Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.

Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?

Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

Dr. Melik: Incredible.

Scott said...

Perfect Sleeper reference. Even -- I might go so far as to say -- a Serta Perfect Sleeper reference.

Chris Vosburg said...

Carl writes: But there was a TIME Magazine cover story!

Wasn't this one, was it?

grouchomarxist said...

Thanks, Chris.

When you consider what's at stake, whoever faked that cover deserves a special place in Hell. And George Will needs to have it tattooed on his ass -- with a very blunt, very rusty needle.

Meanie-meanie, tickle a person said...

I'm with Chris Vosburg. The first I remember hearing about climate change was when global *warming* was being discussed on Pacifica in the '80s. The Great Global Cooling flap of the '70s passed me right by.
I'm guessing the fact that *cooling* wasn't accepted by mainstream climate science is the main reason Mychal and his ilk latched onto it. They just naturally root for the underdog...

Doc Logan said...

Remember "Soylent Green"? The desolate state of the Earth in that film was a result of the greenhouse effect.

There was debate in the 1960s over whether pollution would cause the Earth to grow warmer or cooler, but by the 70s consensus began to build on the warming side.

Now that Miami Beach regularly floods at high tide, even on sunny days, the debate is over.

It's a shame George Carlin didn't live a few years longer, he may have achieved his wish of seeing the would end.

Keith said...

I remember the "global cooling" stuff and fear of nuclear winter, but that was during a period when we had a surplus of atomic and hydrogen weapons and a brain-dead president with his hand on the switch.

Going further back to the 70s (when we could afford a subscription to Scientific American), there was the occasional article about the expansion of the desert in sub-Saharan Africa and its effect on agriculture in that region. My first encounter with climate change. "Desertification" was the first term used to describe the warming phenomenon. Because it was only Africa (Africa -- is it a country?) it didn't gain much traction outside of a small cadre of academic researchers.

I'm surprised WSJ actually ran with this article, 'tho. It's stupid and agonizing to read.

Chris Vosburg said...

Doc Logan writes: Remember "Soylent Green"? The desolate state of the Earth in that film was a result of the greenhouse effect.

That and the other concern-trollings of the sixties and seventies: pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, etc.

Which moved me to pull Silent Running (1972) off the shelf, wondering "what was hillbilly hippie Bruce Dern out in space with the last remaining forests and bunny rabbits in geodesic domes for again?"

It's a little vague, but much the same sort of thing-- essentially the pollution/ overpopulation/ depleted resources thing, but no mention of global warming-- or cooling for that matter.

At one point, Dern's character Lowell Freeman lectures his fellow astronauts, who really could give fuck-all, that "on Earth, everywhere you go, the temperature is 75 degrees. Everything is the same; all the people are exactly the same. Now what kind of life is that?"

So not really one or the other, but definitely one of a number of films and books both fiction and nonfiction of that era, that pointed out with alarm that we're carelessly fouling the planet we live on, that our custodianship of our little mudball is found wanting, and for God's sake we'd better start getting it right.

I like to think that we're improving, but maybe that's just the Pollyanna in me.

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