Lords of the Flies

This originally appeared on April 28, 2010, but ends up being MORE timely post-election than it was PRE-election.

The only additional thing you need to know is that, in my neck of the woods, this was the year without flies. Save for those cited in the story, it was a virtually bugless summer in my neighborhood: no flies, no spiders, no mosquitoes, hardly no nothing. No frogs, no snails, no commentary locally that I’ve heard. But I left the fluorescent light on all summer, and hardly drew a bug. An apt metaphor for the election, as  we shall see.

Beelzebub, literally the “Lord of the Flies”

Aptly, Beelzebub is associated with the sin of Pride, hubris. Plenty of that around right now.

Aramis made the following comment and correction, so we should keep this in mind:

aramis
11 May 2010 at 2:36 pm

I’m a bit late commenting on this one, but I know exactly how you feel. I’ve felt that way for a while now, actually.

However, having worked in pest control, I would choose a different insecticide as a metaphor.

Pyrethroids effect the nervous system and kill quite quickly, but I think we’re suffering from something closer to a “growth regulator”, or chitin inhibitor. They’re a group of insecticides that cause a breakdown in the insect’s chitin production which stops them from being able to molt as they grow, produce viable offspring, or to repair their exoskeletons if they are damaged. It’s long and painful, and often results in horrific malformations and limb-loss.

That seems like an apt comparison.

So, here, bearing that correction in mind, here is …

28 APRIL 2010 · 11:57 AM

Dead Fly Buzzing

Note: I’ll get back to my tale of backroom deals in the blogosphere, of paid propagandists and rabid “outing” of any and all “enemies” in a new sort of free-lance McCarthyism in just a moment. But first, a word from our Mission …

America: an idea whose time has come … and gone?

It is spring, and out in the garage/workshop, the flies have come to buzz the fluourescent lights I installed a few years back for better visibility when working with power tools

They’re big black flies, almost the size of a bumblebee, or the tip of your little finger, and when they collide with the glass tubes of the fluorescents, it sounds like the first touch of the grinding wheel to the blank key. Naturally, I do what any American does, and when it gets annoying enough, I hit them with a blast from the “flying insect killer” spraycan, which smells pleasant and kind of like a bathroom ‘aerosol mist’ used to cover up the inevitable aromas of waste disposal via the various nether exits.

And the black flies fly around for a few seconds, become tired, land in the corner and never arise.

There will be a few after-buzzes and then that’s it.

But, for those twenty or thirty seconds after I have sprayed my deadly bathroom air freshener, each of those flies still perceives itself and behaves as though it were still alive. But it’s not. It’s a dead fly buzzing.

And I wonder, this election, if American “representative government” isn’t the dead fly buzzing here.

This blog originally began when I ran for state representative in my district because I knew that the “incumbent” (appointed, as are all our state representatives, so that he could run as an “incumbent” in his first election) was receiving over 91% of his funding from OUTSIDE THE DISTRICT! Worse, he was receiving 75% from out of state.

I started because I feared for “home rule,” which is the very basis of democratic, representative government.

But, our local media, comatose and ever-downsized, felt themselves too good, too important, and too jaded to cede my claims any editorial space or airing. And, the final vote tally in a three person race, almost exactly corresponded  to the amount of money spent.

Crickets.

And I learned a terrible truth: the “parties” are just debating societies. The actual election is a well-oiled event, run by outside consultants and political professionals, who are paid to win elections, BY WHATEVER MEANS. These outsiders take the outside money of the special interests (and if you aren’t giving four figures, you’re not a player. The old days of the $10 and $25 contribution are purely window-dressing. Only the big players matter.

In 2005, for the late, lamented AVA OREGON! (formerly and again the Anderson Valley Advertiser), I traveled to Seattle, and across Oregon, to detail a Western “political professional” operating as a gun for hire and noted for his nasty campaigns.

Crickets.

And, increasingly, the House or Senate Republican or Democratic PAC contributes the biggest chunk of a candidate’s finances — in a system in which finance is all — and, thus, are the representatives beholden to their leadership, and not to their constituents, whose only contribution, it seems, was to a demographically targeted and predictable statistical model that delivered votes based on pre-polled “issues” and professionally generated p0litical “commercials” that exist solely to deliver those votes, the rational process having been neatly bypassed.

And we end up with a elected official beholden ONLY to special interests and the statehouse party leadership, and NOT AT ALL beholden to their voters. And this is increasingly true at the national level.

In 2004, following the national RNC’s example, the DNC took control of the national database of all registered voters. As the RNC had been carpetbagging western states for years for cheap senate seats, suddenly every seat in the country becomes the plaything of groups “money bombing” a candidate’s war chest, or rich donors from everywhere.

Crickets.

In 2006, I spent a summer and fall investigating and “outing” a shadowy group of Eastern gazillionaires who hired local “front men” for their pre-packaged ballot campaigns, engaged in a stealth campaign of private legislation, attempting to trick states into advancing their crypto-libertarian agenda, and succeeding only in Arizona, appropriately enough. The media sort of reported it, but never seemed to really GET it.

Why? Well, perhaps because they are owned by and WORK for those same shadowy gazillionaires.

Crickets.

AirAmerica goes on the air, but can’t seem to get stations, because the gazillionaires own the airwaves, and one, ClearChannel out of San Antonio, Texas, takes more than one successful AirAmerica station off the air to replace it with a LESS successful station format. AirAmerica struggles on for awhile, then goes under. But it is more a pr0of that the monied interests control the media, and, thus what that media reports.

Now, the Supreme Court decides that gazillionaires can spend money THROUGH their businesses (corp0rations, which are virtually ALWAYS controlled by one main interest, with the investors along for the ride)  to as much cash as they can possibly afford. It’s FREE SPEECH! intone the Alter Boys in another 5-4 decision.

If you’ve ever tried to buy a radio ad, you’ll vouch for how “free” that kind of free speech is.

NO: Home rule is gone.

Money = votes.

Professionals feed off the m0ney.

Facts can be manufactured to thrill certain demographics of the audience. Faux Nooz™ today:

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Archaeology
Updated April 27, 2010

Has Noah’s Ark Been Found on Turkish Mountaintop?

FOXNews.com

The remains of Noah’s Ark have been discovered 13,000 feet up a Turkish mountain — according to a sensational claim by evangelical explorers.

ARTICLE COMMENTS (508)

We can sell you ANYthing.
Even Noah’s Ark and Pieces 0f the True Cross™

Except that even a perfunctory search would have turned out that it’s a hoax (not to mention pseudoscience to begin with, and it’s sad and unprofessional to be publishing such crap as ‘SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY’ and “Archaeology”), and that this whole thing is an almost keystone kops kind of absurdist theater:

Latest Ark finding is a fake

Category: Creationism
Posted on: April 28, 2010 7:56 AM, by PZ Myers

This is completely unsurprising. An account from Randall Price has emerged; Price is a notorious Ark-hunter, young earth creationist, and professor at Liberty University, so he has good kook credentials and is the kind of guy who desperately wants the recent claims of the discovery of Noah’s Ark to be true, making this an admission contrary to his biases…of course, it turns out he also has a money motive to begrudge the Chinese evangelicals their ‘discovery’. But this is also a familiar story.

I was the archaeologist with the Chinese expedition in the summer of 2008 and was given photos of what they now are reporting to be the inside of the Ark. I and my partners invested $100,000 in this expedition (described below) which they have retained, despite their promise and our requests to return it, since it was not used for the expedition. The information given below is my opinion based on what I have seen and heard (from others who claim to have been eyewitnesses or know the exact details).

To make a long story short: this is all reported to be a fake. The photos were reputed to have been taken off site near the Black Sea, but the film footage the Chinese now have was shot on location on Mt. Ararat.

[...]

As I said, I have the photos of the inside of the so-called Ark (that show cobwebs in the corners of rafters – something just not possible in these conditions) and our Kurdish partner in Dogubabyazit (the village at the foot of Mt. Ararat) has all of the facts about the location, the men who planted the wood, and even the truck that transported it.  [MORE]

That’s just an extreme version. The recent faked videos that bankrupted ACORN, and various other manufacturings of reality point to a country that is increasingly Disneyland America (complete with omnipresent camera surveillance and secret police) as opposed to America, in PRECISELY the same way that Disneyland New Orleans Square resembled actual New Orleans after Katrina.

It’s SUPPOSED to be America, but it doesn’t look or feel like it.

I will continue to fight the good fight, but I am increasingly dubious that it matters. I do what I do because it’s the right thing to do, and not because I hold out much hope for home rule or representative democracy.

The same media owned by those pushing their electoral agendas receive their own advertising money they’ve paid out from one hand to the other via a thousand shell identities. And all we can do is watch TV. We’ve flown through the aerosol mist of high-definition Three Dee “fair and balanced” discourse in Surround Sound™ to see our politicians, still, as Mark Twain or Will Rogers or Devo notes, “the best that money can buy.”

And democracy — government by consent of the governed — is just that dead fly buzzing in the corner.

Courage.