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When you’re a mushroom, you don’t expect anybody to tell you the truth.
We must be mushrooms, because they keep us in the dark and feed us nothing but crap. The dominant media, the government, needless to say the politicians — they all lie to us, all the time, when it matters and when it doesn’t, in big things and small.
Take a small thing. The other day, all the websites and channels were vibrating to a version of the headline: “Driverless Uber Cars Debut in Pittsburgh.” It was, to read the headlines and the first two-thirds of the articles, the dawning of the age of the driverless. That’s the “narrative” right now, that a day after tomorrow the highways will be gorged with cars driving themselves while happy commuters take drugs and watch movies, or whatever.
(One early adopter switched on his Tesla “autopilot,” that is what Tesla calls it, and while speeding along a Florida highway, fired up a Harry Potter movie to watch while his car drove. He died for his gullibility.)
But back to Pittsburgh and the driverless Uber cars. In the final paragraphs of some of those stories you learned that all the cars had Uber drivers sitting in the drivers’ seat. So when ABC News trumpeted that Pittsburghers were getting “a taste of a driverless future,” ABC was, you know, lying. All of them were lying. Pittsburghers were getting a taste of a driverless future but with drivers. Which is like getting a taste of steak by eating some liver.
In big things, too, they lie to us. A week ago, for example (60 days before the Presidential election), the Census Bureau reported the largest increase in the median income of American families in a half a century, plus a simultaneous drop in the poverty rate. Read the articles again and you will notice that these numbers apply to 2015 as compared to 2014. Any buzz we would have felt from this historic increase in richness and reduction in poorishness, we should have felt a year ago, and is long gone. You remember anything? Me neither.
Of the 5.2% increase in the median income reported, the Census Bureau reports (elsewhere) that 3.8% is the result of a 2014 change in the questions asked in the surveys and in the calculations used to get the result. Much of the rest is attributable to lower gas prices.
The government made a very big deal out of these genetically manipulated numbers, and of the implication that the Great Recovery has finally taken effect for the Little People and Happy Days are Here Again (Rpt., rpt., rpt.)
About this, and so many other things, they lied. Median household income, aside from a brief, small uptick in 2015, it declined in 2016, has been declining for 20 years, and is lower than it was before the Great Recovery began, seven years ago. In fact it’s lower than it was in 1997.
They do the same thing with the unemployment rate, placing it at an “official” five-point-something per cent while refusing to account for the millions of able-bodied adults who are not in the work force, but yet are not “unemployed” and are neither students nor elderly.
So we live in a world where, according to those whose job it is to in form us and instruct us, driverless cars have drivers, ordinary people are earning more money while their standard of living declines, and people who can’t get jobs are not unemployed.
It’s nice here in the dark, and after a while you get used to the funny smell.
It really isn’t possible to describe the media, the politicians, and increasingly, academia without the word lie.
I’ve found several theories as to why this is, yet none of these theories accounts for the true magnitude of the lying complex.
For one, our culture now teaches expediency, me first, and sliming out of tight spots. Those unfortunate enough to hold to a code beyond this suffer at the hands of their lying, compassionless, responsibility shirking fellow citizens.
Secondly, history-that which defines where all this came from, has for so long been a pathetic distortion that sifting for the truth takes the lion’s share of historic study.
Then we have mandatory “education”, which began as a vast mind control effort, and managed to find consistently lower thresholds ever since the fateful establishment of the “department of education”.
Seen in this light, the endless sophistry we are bombarded with strikes me as something symptomatic of a more profound pathology.
This is a good report.
And how about an article about the frogs?
Not the French although they often seem to be stuck on a track.
The frog you put in a pot of water and turn the heat on. They are oblivious to the change around them and stay to die.
Arnie A.
Good one, Mr. Lewis, and unfortunately true.
Besides lying they’ve shut down government radiation monitoring (better not to know than be lied to?), adopted policies that are guaranteed to cause economic (and possibly governmental) collapse before long (look at the derivatives market, for one), and continue the same policies in other areas that are causing wide-spread environmental degradation, species die-offs and resource depletion.
It seems that short-term monetary gain wins out over any and all existential concerns. Thus, extinction awaits (due to habitat destruction mainly, but with a lot of contributing factors) because they’re too stupid to change and (since that’s the way it’s been all along) it’s far too late anyway.
All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.
I.F. Stone 1967
The same thing is happening here in Ohio when they report on the new medical marijuana law. Every single story shows mariuana plants, but never shows the actual pillthat people would take.
As trust in anyone or anything continues to evaporate, the “every man for himself” mentality will flourish; yet another of the positive feedbacks of destruction we’ve created affecting our world and our culture(s). This will not end evenly, but it will end badly.
Amen, Tom. Ranked right up there with lying is the way even clear words are distorted. The media reports that government officials are not lying, but are perhaps untruthful or less than truthful.
It is sort of like the definition of a dead person from the politically correct dictionary. They are not dead. They are terminally inconvenienced. A dog is not a dog. It is a canine American and the list goes on.
It would take a library of investigative books just to document how incredibly dumb and arrogant the media and the government have become. It truly is unbelievable that that they can say the things they do with a straight face and not break out laughing at how absurd they sound. It is sad and alarming, but you can’t even make this stuff up.
I hope you will keep up the great writing, although it is extremely depressing that you shine your light on the surreal world we live in…