This isn’t for you… yet here it is.
Basically, I need a place to clear out my brain. Years ago, I wrote for the “unofficial blog of the cia.” It was a great place to put down notes on current events, their larger picture ramifications for society, and catalog the many ideas I had before setting down to do my real days work.
One of the many things I was writing about then was energy security. Energy security is a fascinating and convoluted topic with many a tangled line. Nothing is cut and dry. Nothing is what it seems. With the advent of the multinational corporation, securing energy becomes a relative notion. There are US companies that can easily secure more profits if they offer advantages to companies and countries outside the US. And what in theory may be best for the US is sometimes not what is best for US citizens… It is good for profits, good for bank accounts, but terrible for health (which ultimately depletes bank accounts, but often ones that have no vested interest in the corporate profits.)
So as I wrote and researched a new thing was emerging. Fracking. One of the damnedest things humans have ever invented, second only perhaps to the idea of spraying poison on their food. (Say that over and over 10 times til it really sinks in : we spray poison on our food. We spray poison on our food…)
Fracking is equally as ludicrous. We sink a cocktail of 150 toxic components into the ground. Chemicals that not only cause cancer but are designed to spread and have a wide reach underground. It is easily the most rapid way to poison aquifers we’ve come up with. It is literally injecting poison into our water. Why? Jobs is what Shell will tell you. But unless you were born yesterday we all know… corporate profits.
So in the early days of fracking I though, no fucking way. No fucking way would people allow this on their land. (Boy, did I get proved wrong…) and I frequently made note of the Stansberry Corporation, a weird analytic company that seemed to have a deep vested interest in spreading all the wonder and joy of fracking. And even though this was in the early days of blogging, 2003 or so, I was suddenly finding my readership sky rocket. People were curious about this new thing. Stansberry sent me multiple Cease and Disist. I continued. I had nothing to lose and wasn’t saying anything untrue. It was ludicrious what we started doing on our land and foreign land. So ludicrous that the GWB admin had to make it’s first effort when they won to remove the fracking chemicals from the EPA’s list of dangerous chemicals. Suddenly their “proprietary” importance was legally more important than their carcinogenic aspects.
Well, then I had a baby while I was finishing grad school. The blog went silent for a while. And when I returned I found I’d been hacked and Google shut down “the unofficial blog of the cia.” The audicity.
And with it I lost one of my best mental excercises. A place to warm up my brain, spill a little analytics and get my brain ready to dive into more important matters… fiction.
But today my brain has one more thing to sort through. I can’t help it. Instagram is a bastard. A million ideas flashing before our eyes every time we click on the phone. Random people. People we follow, or often don’t, that are presented freely in front of our brains broadcasting whatever the FB algorithm thinks we might be interested in. And this one particular component fascinates me and makes me want to do a deeper dive into it at some point… and it is this. How does our brain determine what sticks? In this way, throughout our lives there are certain perceptions of reality that we assume are true and false. And it’s fascinating and a good exercise to regularly try to track those down and examine them. The things we consider to be facts about our world… Geese fly in a V. Easy. They do. We observe it. But what about other things: Salt is actually really good for you. Well yes, if you have studied biology and specifically human anatomy recently you likely have a well informed view of this, but I’m more thinking about those of of us that have not. For example, on my Instagram feed this morning some guy claiming to be a Doctor is going on and on about how good salt is for you. He has 10 slides telling the benefits and the falsehoods around salt, and how the negatives can actually be attributed more to processed food and fats. He offers this convincingly. As I put my raw peanut butter on my morning toast soon after I find myself adding a strong dash of salt.
My brain took it. Went with it.
This is a minor example really, but we have hundreds if not thousands of assumptions we all carry with us day to day, and it is important that we learn to evaluate them and figure out where exactly they came from. It becomes an almost impossible task this day in age when we are presented with a continuous onslought of information, most of which has a very specific agenda of selling us something, either an idea or good that profits someone else. And those someone else's often have no vested interest in our personal well being. That is the danger. The impersonalized global commodity chain now has reach into every nook and cranny of our consciousness. Social media, which is really now much more corporate media, whether we like to admit it or not, is constantly working to get us to think and buy a certain way. It is the new way to brain wash. Made easier than anything the old intel agencies used to do, because now people willingly open their device, and go straight into the beast.
It’s a wild world. Buckle up. Now time for fiction.
