So where've I been?

After sick, and after the big performance last week, I've been songwriting and learning to play more of my own damn music. But that said...

First, a moment of potentially very good news. Luxim has a tiny plasma lightbulb that claims 140 lumens per watt. If so and it has no major drawbacks, this is epic win, combining better-than-cf efficiency with a small form factor, dimmability, no mercury, and scale that LEDs currently can't manage. And that's a big deal. Fingers crossed.

Now, back to bad events. In politics, I'm going to stick to one story only: the massive psyop the Pentagon and Bush administration have been conducting on the American public. Please, please, please, please read that story so you have the context and information. No, It's not surprising, I suppose, but that does not mean you should be blasé about it; not only was access cut off to analysts who wouldn't toe the Bush Administration line, but so were contracts. Criticise Mr. Bush; your company gets fucked. This is yet another case of the desperate corruption and politicisation of all levels of the government.

All this is incredibly bad, but true. And, of course, the television media are working to bury the story by ignoring it. Not contesting it; just offering no comment and carrying no stories about it, as Fox News, CBS, and NBC - and others, really - continue to operate as the propaganda wing of the Bush administration. The contemptible wretches which make up these organisations have long ago sacrificed any shred of credibility. But I want to get to a pair of key motives and perceptions of the people behind this operation.

One: The American public are the enemy. The American public was the target of this psy-op, with the idea that the American public knowing what's actually going on in Iraq was the problem, and that this awareness must be obsfucated at every opportunity. Keep that in mind.

Two: Their analysis of Vietnam, and their response to it:

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

The then somewhat more independent American media and the American public lost faith in government reports about progress in Vietnam because the American government consistently and continually lied about that progress. Once those lies were self-evident, confidence and support collapsed. The authoritarians like to pretend that they were stabbed in the back by a leftie media out to destroy the country; that's a lie, and worse, an excuse.

The Bush administration and Pentagon apparently took away from that experience the lesson that the American public are the problem, and that the appropriate response was not to truthfully inform the public about the actual costs and worth of the endeavour, but instead to lie much, much more, and more comprehensively; to conduct a psy-op against the American public; to politicise the armed forces; and to subvert the media through a massive structure of de facto Pentagon agents posing as independent analysts. (And, again, note that hangers-on of the Court at Versailles's response has been to try to bury this reality.)

I would allege that these were exactly the wrong lessons to take; that they decided to try doing the same thing, only more. From this, I think the most reasonable explanation for this decision is very simple: they really do loathe and despise you. They hold you in contempt. They see you as dupes; they see you as the target. Remember that.