Americans Believe the Darndest Things

I would like to talk more about what that KCET guy refers to as “Memes” or “beliefs” that are accepted as axiomatic. What this speaker says has many merits. My dispute with him is not that people don’t have incorrect and false beliefs. My beef with him is that Reality is determined by What we believe. But sometimes “memes” can get us into trouble. When I was a kid I picked up the message somehow from movies or TV that “You don’t run from the police”. If you run from the police it’s the same as putting a target on your back and giving them permission to shoot you. In the news was this father of two young children who was just walking home with a friend or whatever from playing video games. And he saw some cops and ran behind a fence and was shot and killed. I think there is no question these sorts of events occur all the time. I would imagine that only a small fraction of the time are Police in any jeopardy for their lives when they claim they are. The truth is they just like to shoot their guns. Of course this errant officer left in his wake a grieving family mourning an innocent man.

Then we have the “Meme” that anybody who uses the word “conspiracy” has to be a whacko. It’s almost part of common lore spread by talk show hosts that “conspiracies never happen”. Personally I don’t have this “Meme” so my mind is not controlled by it. So when people look at how the Twin Towers in New York collapsed and they see two buildings that look like they were professional collapsed by a demolition team with explosives, I am inclined to believe my eyes. The collapse of both buildings was too sudden – being only minutes after being hit - and they fell a little too suddenly and too neatly for it not to have been planned. You may not remember this but as I recall they were saying in the media that the buildings would collapse even before they did, planting the idea in our minds that this event was to be expected and shouldn’t come as any surprise. This whole idea of “not coming as any surprise” is something that Thom Hartman talks about saying the government “prepairs” us for events that would otherwise come as a shock, so that when the measures come, we don’t react to them. I was looking at conspiracy theories in Google the other day and one thing I quickly noticed that the first several conspiracy sites I clicked on, were all anti conspiracy. The Wickepedia would run down all the theories and dismiss each one with often stupid logic. I couldn’t help compare how they deal with, for example, “Arguments favoring the existence of God”. There are five main ones: Revelation, Ontological, Cosmological, Teological, and Moral. But if at the end of each one they put “Of course we know this theory is a bunch of bullshit” I imagine Christians wouldn’t like that very much. Also this whole notion of the Eye Witness is being denigrated. When I hear about one of these cop shooting incidents, I want to hear what the witnesses on the scene saw. And when it comes to 9 – 11 I want to know what the people actually on the street saw. But now the media is trying to put forth the message “eye witnesses aren’t reliable” and “people’s minds play tricks on them” and other such rationalization and sophistry.

Some of the things people believe about their government isn’t pretty. Yesterday I watched this video about a “victim” who went bankrupt running a clinic and giving medical aid to illegal aliens and now will be out millions of dollars in legal suits, as if your typical immigrant denied medical service has the money to go out and hire a slick lawyer. Yet this is the image they are trying to lay on us that immigrants consume more services in emergency centers than White people and they are somehow out to “stick it to the establishment”.

And now I’ve heard from multiple sources that California won’t pay tax refunds any more but just pocket the taxpayer’s money. And so some people just aren’t going to pay the taxes they owe but would rather risk incurring a penalty because it’s still better than trusting the State for a refund check. We hear that doctors are now suddenly refusing service to people because Medi-Care is going broke and there is too much fraud and that it’s better not to trust anybody but only deal with people you know will pay.

Then there is the whole idea of repealing the fourteenth amendment when it comes to people being US citizens if born on US soil. While others of the right will point to the high percentage of Blacks incarserated in prisons. And others point to statistics saying that the majority of Black births aren’t to married mothers. Of course you know that William Halliday found a reason to hate homosexuals saying “In almost every case a man who is a homosexual was himself molested as a child”. The mental imigry is subtle here but the reasoning goes “molestation is a horrible, traumatic event. We know that horrible, traumatic events never happen to God’s Chosen People, therefore anyone who has a past different from mine must not be a Christian”. Chains of reason don’t need to be rational to work or to “get their point across” - - - being that homosexuality is something so awful I don’t even want to soil my lips to even utter the word”.

Some things are a little hard to prove. You’ve heard of the “Columbian Neck Tie” and Johnny Cockrin screwed up this phrase. Well, according to Tom Hartman, CIA Chief William Casey was all set to give testimony on Iran-Contra in 1987 when that very day the hospital doctors cut out the portion of Casey’s brain that control’s speech.

In a similar vein, it is said that Lehman Brothers was allowed to financially fail because people in the government who control such events were all on the board of competitor Goldman – Sachs and this would be a good way to wipe out the competition. This is one of those “objection sustained” phrases to get out there before a Jury.

In the book “Legacy of secrecy” there is a lot of talk about ramifications stemming from the Kennedy assassination that affect us all to this very day. This is kind of another of those cases where you don’t to interview eye witnesses – people who were actually there that day. Also you better not look at the Zapruter film, because that, too, may give you the wrong idea. For that matter, John Conally, who actually rode in the car and was wounded himself- - isn’t a good witness to these “anti-conspiritists” because he believes that gun shots came from more than one direction. But even facts that are copiously documented, like the Ohio presidential election in 2004 in Rolling Stone, people will not believe there was any “conspiracy” simply because “They don’t believe in conspiracies”, period. People say that Gore didn’t run in 2008 “because he’s just not popular enough to get elected president”. How quickly people forget that Al Gore WON the popular vote in the election of 2000. This is the ultimate “Inconvenient Truth”.

Dr. Levy says he doesn’t trust anything Al Gore does because Gore is a hypocrite and his giant house wastes energy. This “Meme” of Dr. Levy’s is no doubt one he takes great comfort in, but - - . This may come as a shock to some people but being a hypocrite does not invalidate the True things that people state. John Lennon called the Maharishi a hypocrite because he had sexual affairs. My question is how do his sexual escapades affect his teaching on “Transcended Meditation”? And it does not exactly help John Lennon’s moral case to then go out and have a sexual affair and then divorce his wife. The difference between Christianity and just about ANY other system is while other organizations Contain hypocrites, Christianity IS hypocracy. But you take these international corporations who export our jobs as well as our pollution and believe rich people should be bailed out. These people aren't hypocrites. That's exactly what they believe. (Selah)