We're watching you

Now, I can't tell you where, and I can't tell you who, but I overheard something disturbing, the other day, while trying, oddly enough, to do my job.

I overheard someone who Knows Too Much.

Yes, I'm afraid so. He's onto us. He's caught onto the fact that it wasn't a buncha angry young Islamists who flew planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, killed some 3,000 people, a few years back now. He knows.

Or he sorta knows. He knows it can't have been a commercial passenger jetliner which hit the first tower, at least—and that's making me nervous. He thinks maybe it was a military fuel tanker. And the Pentagon thing? He thinks it was a missile. Or somethin'...

Good thing he hasn't yet found out about the giant space laser frisbees we really used. Or I'd haveta just have 'em abducted by our alien collaborators right off.

And that's always so much paperwork. And such a mess to cover up. I mean, ya'd think the damned Greys would get with the program, just grab 'em using a black van or somethin' like the rest of us do, stop messing around with the flying saucers and those goofy probes of theirs, get the whole missing memory/missing time thing right. But noooo... they always gotta hover over the farmhouse, walk through the walls, make the big entrance, leave a few telltale traces of nightmare, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder to mess people up, send 'em sobbing off to their shrinks... Such a pain. I'm pretty damned sure they're doing it on purpose, purely out of vanity. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: what part of 'conspiracy' don't these allegedly technologically superior twits understand? They're not supposed to be bucking for fame. Abduction ain't about the glory. Get in, get out, get it done. And enough with grabbing the dead/washed up celebrities. That Elvis thing, that was just asking for trouble. What the hell were they thinking?

Anyway, getting back to the issue of the day: we're gonna have to watch this guy. And just to make sure he knows we're watchin', I'm thinkin' I'm gonna have to slip one of those plastic keychain 'Illuminati' model all-seein' pyramid thingies into his briefcase, next time he's not watchin'.

That's always good for a laugh.

(A little) more seriously:

A friend asked a little while ago why I blog.

My reponse was one word: "Tourette's".

With due respect to the poor folks genuinely afflicted with that odd and disturbing disorder, it's a bit like that. They're compelled by a brain disorder to say stuff that ain't good for their social life...

Me, I'm compelled to research and write stuff that ain't good for me, in the overall sense. There's something you know you shouldn't be doing—shouldn't be getting into—'cos it's not smart, there aren't enough hours in the day, and this sure as hell ain't the time, and so on, and so on, but somehow, it's like this itch.

Trouble is, I know a bit about this stuff already. Just enough to get annoyed hearing it trotted out again. Researched it a bit, some months back, when I heard someone else on about the same thing. I've a sick fascination with the way really, really deeply irrational beliefs spread, and I was just curious enough to dig a bit, get a picture of the movement.

And frankly, the way it usually does, it at once pissed me off with its rampant stupidity, and fascinated me in its suggestive similiarity to so many other possibly related phenomena. I believe I see a common currency here with my somewhat conjectural picture of the memetic evolution of religions—a progression toward stories that resist easy refutation, and present enough of the fantastic to get repeated...

And then I had to move on, as usual, before I made myself ill.

Yes, I'm afraid, there really is such a thing as knowing too much. Or, at least, working too hard on it, all at once (but please, don't anyone quote Ecclesiastes here—and by 'anyone' I mean 'Scott'—or I'm sendin' the cliché police after you...)

So, anyway, this twit is goin' on about some of the usual really, really bad crazy September 11 stuff in my earshot—y'know—not enough wreckage on the Pentagon lawn, seismographs that look like explosions, that calibre of thinking. And, sadly, I can't find my headphones, just tune him out. And my BS detectors are all redlining, and a little demon on my shoulder is shouting in my ear: 'Debunk! Debunk! 30,000 words, now! You're up to it! You can do anything! The physics, the metallurgy, whole damned thing. Hit 'em with documents and photos... nail him so hard he never says anything this monumentally stupid in his life again... or at least nowhere near you! Pop outta nowhere (he don't so much know me) and Scully the fuck out of him!...'

Thing is, it ain't on. I'm starting a new job this week. I gotta force my poor, tired brain though a whole lotta crypto algorithms. And if I can get my head outta that long enough to do anything else, it's gonna be to work on a manuscript I might, someday, sell. Not a lotta stuff already said by folk better qualified to do it without having to study in sometimes entirely new fields.

I had started something. Long piece starting with the fact that I don't much like the Bush administration, and do think it's valid to suggest they might have some questions to answer about their management of intelligence regarding such threats... then moving to the fact that asking some of the questions these folk are asking in the first place isn't so crazy, overall. Not given things governments have done and tried to cover up that we can substantiate—and how, in fact, the notion that a government might try to hurt a lot of people and then hide the fact later isn't really so far-fetched...

Then moving to why that is, and a little on what some of the real coverups looked like. Like the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations' attempts to obfuscate what happened in Halabja, for the benefit of the Ba'ath party, back when Hussein was the guy we were counting upon to hassle the Iranians. Like the blackballing of coverage of the El Mozote massacre, for the benefit of the regime in El Salvador. Like the games the military plays with studies into the effects of depleted uranium. Like the messing around with intelligence done to cook up a suitably popular pretext to invade Iraq. And on and on...

And how very not like those sorts of things the so-called 'September 11 truth movement's' idiot tangle of ambgiuous video artifacts, mildly anamolous eyewitness reports and half-baked one world government crap looks... How the problem isn't always with the questions, some of which aren't so crazy... it's with the answers they find, and their standards for evidence in arriving at those.

Trouble is, I can't do that. Not today. Probably not anytime soon. It's a big babble, thing is. Probably takes about as long to dissect as the idiocy of, oh, say, the creationists... And I got other fish to fry.

So here's a few suggestions if you're curious: you hear any of this stuff, do check out the Snopes page, besides Michael Shermer's comment on the thing (not terribly informative, but nicely put, however), and, finally, Popular Mechanics' view of the thing... and yes, Popular Mechanics is kinda a booster of the military, and yes, the so-called 'truth movement' deeply hates this piece, calls it a hatchet job, straw man attack, so on... but do read it anyway, and assess for yourself what credibility it leaves on the table for those so pissed with it. And check a few journals for yourself, if you're still wondering, 'bout certain claims made about steel...

Me, I should probably be working on some crypto stuff.

You know. So the one world government can get on with its business without being interrupted.