Translate

Saturday, May 04, 2013

Conspiracies in Plain Sight

You know I loves me a good conspiracy theory as much as the next prole, but I think brother Orlov might be reaching a bit here (though his deeper insights as to the history of Russian-Chechen enmity is certainly interesting). It's not that it's inconceivable that people in the gubmint could and would conspire to do horrible things -- it is a business that seems to attract casual psychopaths -- it's that they are simply too organizationally inept and individually talkative to pull something like that off. There's always (okay, usually) one sane individual in any given room that says, if only to themselves, "Wait. What the fuckety-fuck!?!"

This is not to say that Orlov's assumption of false-flag absolutely can't be true, just that it's extraordinarily unlikely, that there's zero reliable evidence of such, and that at least one of his corroborating links appear to be babble and bullshit poached from WhirledNutDaily. But hey, it's a free country, it's okay to ask questions, even if they turn out to be the wrong questions. One thing people across the political spectrum can agree on is that historically, the powerful have tended to resort to unsavory means in order to retain or expand their hold on said power.

Now, all of that said, it is not tinfoil-hattery to point out that the incredibly militarized response in Boston should give one pause. In an urban area that has its share of armed assholes shooting one another routinely, the town went into martial-law lockdown with a fucking quickness, to hunt for a kid who might or might not have a gun and/or a jerry-rigged pressure cooker.

This is not to minimize the threat that the Tsarnaev brothers posed at a time of genuine chaos, but rather to suggest that this is a case of the creeping paramilitarization of municipal police forces. You want the good guys to have more and better weapons than the bad guys, but we're looking at zombie-apocalypse measures being utilized on a city of over half a million people, in response to a vicious crime, but one that is routine in many countries, the way gun massacres are routine here.

These extreme measures should be cause for some concern -- what, every time some asshole figures out how to make an IED or a pipe bomb in his basement, the entire city has to squat in their hovels while SWAT teams and private security firms wave their automatic weapons at every window?

And while Orlov's assumptions may appear to be off-base, his rationales have at least some credibility. The implosion of the empire continues apace, Dow 15000 notwithstanding. The oligarchs have made it clear that the planet is their cash cow, and they don't feel like sharing, because fuck you. Notions of pay commensurate with strenuousness and difficulty of work are whimsically archaic; in the Excel paradise, the man with the golden algorithm sets the earning curve.

But imperial maintenance is costly, and as noted, the donor class only shells out money in order to rent pols to do their bidding; maintaining infrastructure and creating jobs is your fucking problem, hoss. Capital mobility is king, and you are but a serf. What happens if gasoline prices hit six, seven bucks a gallon here, and supply chains start getting iffy? You ever take a look at how your food supply chain operates, how heavily it depends on the affordability of petroleum? What is the official response when the plebes start rioting for reals, when the cheez doodles are no longer on the shelves? What happens when the financial racket finally blows out like the bald tire that it really is?

And the debates over whether Boston was false-flag or not can continue as more evidence (or "evidence") comes in, but one fact comes through regardless -- this was a golden opportunity for gubmint to flex nuts and test civil response mechanisms in case of extreme circumstances.

Since there were no reports of anything untoward during the lockdown, one can assume that compliance has been found sufficient. Regular programming can resume.

No comments: