I See A Darkness

Anyone who has ever experienced genuine depression knows the feeling. To some it is as a darkness, clouding the mind. It calls to MY mind, the voice of Johnny Cash singing I See A Darkness. I've spent the last couple of days...nights actually, watching lectures from Stanford and Yale on philosophy, political philosophy, neurology and the workings of the brain; watching various documentaries; keeping an eye on the news headlines which continually renew in my Google sidebar on my desktop.

The darkness I see comes in two forms; one is purely personal and subjective inside my head, and the other is a kind of philosophical darkness which hangs like a thunderhead over the affairs of humans. Unfortunately, the latter can too often affect the former. One of the videos I watched about the brain is called controlling the brain with light. If you watch this one, note at about the halfway point (it's only about 18 minutes), that it is possible to use fiber optic light to control a brain, in this case a mouse brain, and you can make him turn left. Presumably, you can also make him turn right if the light is repositioned, but a world of people turned politically "right" too great a horror to contemplate. At the end the inevitable note of caution is mentioned about who will control the technology and for what purposes...what technological advance has never been abused or used for evil purposes?

Not having access to the technology of fiber optics and the ability to insert it into my brain, I had to make do with subjecting myself to daylight, and to a brief bout of strenuous physical activity in order to, hopefully, stimulate the electrochemistry to improve the mood...results are mixed. As to the external sources of darkness, one is the rather astounding things mentioned in this Pat Condell video in which he mentions, get this, one does NOT have to be a citizen of Sweden in order to hold high political office in Sweden. I had to look that one up. "Immigrants resident for three years in Sweden have the right to vote and run for office in local elections." Source. I'm not sure if the mere fact of residing there for three years automatically "naturalizes" a person into being a citizen, but that whole thing sounds fishy to me.

Most of us recognize that there always has been, and always will be, propaganda in politics. Do we not? Do we think OUR country is better than that? Well, our leaders are not. Too often, such talk is dismissed as "conspiracy theories", and there are certainly plenty of those, some of them dumb as rocks. That doesn't change the fact that most people who have great political power do not think any law at all applies to them. The following is part 1 of 9 (please watch them all if you care and can) of a Bill Moyers program which aired on PBS in 1987. Yes, it's a bit dated, and much of it deals with the Iran-Contra Affair, which most younger people probably know nothing about. Still, Moyers is not a name that comes to mind in "conspiracy theories", and the program shows documented evidence of the fact that every president from 1945 onward, has looked into the TV camera and directly and blatantly lied to the population about the various wars and other secretive machinations; Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan... and there is no reason to think that anything has improved in that vein since Reagan. After all, we didn't even have the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, or being forcibly subjected to visual and/or physical sexual assault in order to fly on a plane then.

Question: If the US Constitution says that Congress has the power to declare war (and it does, in Article 1, Sec. 8), then why has the US been in so many wars? Do you know how many times Congress has declared war? Five times. The last time we had legitimate cause to be in a war was World War II. It is an understandable and legitimate that we decry our alleged leaders repeatedly getting the nation into illegal wars. But, does it occur to us that there could not be any war - at least not yet - except for the grunts on the ground. Why do they do it? Why do they totally abdicate any sense of personal integrity and moral responsibility. Dubya said that torture was legal because the lawyers said so. So... a war is legal if only the president says so?

Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) states that a soldier is required to "...obey any lawful general order or regulation" Do you doubt there would be an immediate Congressional declaration of war if any other nation attacked us? If Congress has not declared any war, then how is it a legal order, even from the Commander In Chief, the President, to go fight? Fight for what? Does anyone care at all?

I suggest you read Orwell's 1984 (it's free online), with particular attention to the notion of perpetual war.

This? Oh, I just really like the song and video...

TRB