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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >Then James, what *should* we do? Hunker down in our foxholes and wait  
> for the nuclear winter to blow away?
> 
> It's guns or it's politics, as far as I can see.

-----------------

Celia, one of the oldest ploys in the world to control pepole is to give them 
a false choice.  Very bad parents engage in this.  The small child does not 
want to go anywere so the parent with no parenting skills says, "It's time to 
go, do you want to wear your red coat or your blue coat?"  The idea being 
that 
as soon as the child is engaged in resloving the false choice, their 
objection 
to the underlying premise will be suspended for long enoug for them to be 
manipulated.

The Nazis used this masterfully.  There were only about 3,000 SS and other 
personnel assigned to remove 450,000 jews from the ghetto, that is, the jews 
could have refused to cooperate and there was nothing the Germans could have 
done 
about it.  So they devised a series of exercises giving the jews completely 
meaningless choices.  They were issued ID cards of different colors and left 
to 
wonder what the different colors meant.  Was it better to have a blue card 
than a red one (much like the coat above)?  They were allowed to freely sell 
or 
trade the cards and while they were mulling over that, tens of thousands were 
deported and killed.

Then they marched large numbers of them down a road that forked.  Both prongs 
of the fork lead to death within a short time.  The jews were not forced nor 
even told which fork to take and were so engaged in determining and 
speculating which road was the better, they resisted not a whit.

I am so much remined of that every time I hear that the people, especially 
the young people, are so excited over the Obamessiah, and that, hey, after 
all 
if you look at it long and hard enough he can actually appear to have some 
very 
small token advantage over the other candidate.

AFTER ALL, IF YOU DON'T SUPPORT ONE OR THE OTHER, THAT MEANS YOU ARE DOING 
NOTHING.

All caps to emphasize that this is the same sort of mental mechanism that I 
described in my old student Thartha who was found in the glow of the open 
refrigerator unable to go on because once the obvious and conditioned choices 
were 
removed, in her mind there was nothing left.

Advocating support for one candidate who is microscopically better, and 
falsely microscopically better at that, than the other candidate is choosing 
the 
red card over the blue card rather than joining the ghetto uprising.

And it's not guns or the ballot box.  It's the lifestlye.

After the first oil shocks of the 70's, we had a choice to turn our society 
from oil based to something else based.  And I don't mean falling for the 
Thartha syndrome yet again and going whizzing about in electric cars instead 
of gas 
cars.  I mean an actual righ angle turn in which society isn't based on 
bigger cars and bigger houses and ski-dos and ATVs and RVs, but rather based 
on 
something else. 

Having made such a turn in the very late 70's, Reagan played Isidlur and 
stood holding the oil culture over Mount Doom and refused to cast it in.  As 
Elrond said, "It should have ended there."  Instead he chose to rescue the 
near 
defunct dollar by inceasing its peg to Saudi oil and persuading the Saudis 
with 
promisses of military support for their rule to flood the world with cheap 
oil 
in order to bankrupt the Soviet Union who were depending on rising oil prices 
to fund their build-up.

It worked, after a fashion.

Had we not taken that turn back in '80, there would have been no Iraq war.  
Had the American people collectively weaned away from oil, there would have 
been no 9-11, no Afghanastan, no Iraq.   It was far flung exburbs, 70 mile 
commutes, 4000 sq ft McMansions, 5 ltr engines, all financed by an "economy" 
that 
did less and less, produced less and less, and depended on the profits of 
trading Oil baseball cards to finance it all.

So choose the red card and continue your march to Baba Yar and pretend as if 
that is 'doing something'.  I choose to join the resistance.  That means by 
any method or opportunity possible, I will not participate in the 
oil/credit/consumerist culture that is the root cause of our problems.

I'm not hunkered down in a foxhole waiting for anything.  I'm living life now 
and frantically pointing out that way to as many as I can distract from 
mulling over the color of their ID cards.  As you can see from this 
discussion, I 
am not very successful.   </HTML>