It's the money, really, that means everything in the end, isn't it?

Let me see, it was the Christmas season and I was wandering the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica snapping pics with the point and shoot and this is one of the images I ended up with. Maybe it’s the gross commercialization that links Uncle G in my mind to this. Certainly nothing is sacred where money is to be made. Especially human lives.

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.  And that’s the single truth of the world. And that’s debatable as well.

SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE, must know something. Don’t count on it though.

How many think tanks does it take to screw in a regime change? Or unscrew a regime change?  Could the think tanks answer that one?

Naturally, of course, the answers would vary and  depend upon who’s paying and how much. No, that’s wrong.  It’s really just how much – they actually don’t care who pays.

You see, I have been digging through the digital garbage of several think tanks recently trying to get a handle on Libya. I’d just like get some understanding of the situation, you see. Well! Here’s a couple of  quotes about Libya that you might find interesting (from 2007). Comes from one of those prominent think tankers:

“Libya under Gaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally.”

Further: “Completely off the radar, without spending a dollar or posting a single soldier, the United States has a potential partner in what could become an emerging Arab democracy smack in the middle of Africa’s north coast.”

This crap appeared in the Washington Post! Written by Benjamin Barber. He wrote a book once about education that was full of solemn vapors and a kind of academic ethereal philosophical mist that comes in a degree-laden canister with directions to spray over every page before reading. It was full of ideas that obscured everything, especially the students.

But this isn’t about Barber. He’s only a symptom. Just one microbe of a broad-spectrum infection that’s spread throughout our media.   This is more about the corporately mind-boggled machinations that get such a stupid puff piece about a tyrant like Gaddafi onto the pages of The Washington Post. (Is that paper, like, actually, like, edited, anymore?) Somebody wanted people to think kindly about the monster. Good for business, you see. Stability. Those retirement condos or whatever. To hell with the people living in the country.

It turns out that some of those people who wanted everyone to cuddle up to Uncle Gaddafi were working for or with a pus-filled entity called The Monitor Group. The Monitor Group is a consulting firm.  According to a recent article in Mother Jones, Monitor had a $3,000,000 a year contract to spread touchy-feely stories about Uncle Gaddafi. Barber, according to Mother Jones, visited with Libyan “officials” and even talked with Uncle G. himself as a “paid consultant” for The Monitor Group. Next thing the Washington Post is printing stories about Uncle Gaddafi and his wonderful new sensitivity.  

 Has there ever been a successful tyrant or a despot or a dictator or monster who lacked a certain charm?  The kind of charm that spritzes out from malicious sincerity and perfumes the air? That masks the fearful odors of people terrified of speaking out against them, or the stench of the carcasses of those people who have spoken out?

That kind of  charm can slip rings through the snouts of  paid sycophants, and it’s not easy to remove them.