What with all the economic bad news we have been getting over the past few months, I have been looking around to see how people are taking it all.
When it started, there was a lot of panic and fear. Now the slide is under way, and we have got more accustomed to the ride, people are settling back into their lives, living a little smaller, waiting out the financial winter, anticipating the spring. And sooner or later, as we all know, things will get better.
But I have been looking at my incoming email, lots of it. I get email from everywhere. From the Left, the Right, the Middle, financial and political news inundates my life.
But out of the noise, certain patterns emerge. I don't know if it is just me, but more and more of the people I talk to in California are sounding suspicious of the stories they are being told by their Federal Government.
Over the past few weeks, it seems some of the inadequate "answers" given by the Bush administration are being dredged out and revisited. For Americans, anything older than the five-year-old bracket is about as current as Stonehenge, so the 9/11 explanations are already ancient history.
But during April, 2009, international scientists were casting more doubts on the truthfulness of the US Government's explanation of the destruction of the Twin Towers. In the absence of proper investigation (a closed 9/11 enquiry that excludes the eye-witness accounts of 450 firefighters, and carefully filters the testimony has little or no credibility, in a true investigator’s eyes), more and more Americans are getting suspicious that maybe, just maybe, their Government has been "protecting" them from the truth. Or plain telling them lies.
The lid that came off in April, 2009, happened when a group of Danish scientists published a peer-reviewed paper in a reputable European scientific magazine. They had studied three samples of dirt taken from the WTC after the buildings fell, and in all three had found samples of what they suggest is a very high-tech thermal explosive, nano-thermite, which must have been made by a very sophisticated manufacturing process. http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM
It would seem that to make a material this sophisticated would require high-tech Government rocket-scientist-type labs like Lawrence Livermore who specialize in this kind of thing and have published on these materials in the past.
Now the first question this raises for most people is, 'Why wasn't this investigation done here in the USA as part of the 9/11 commission, to stop these kind of rumors from getting started?'.
And considering the Federal Government’s response to an investigation of 9/11, it now looks even more suspicious.
You may recall that the Bush White House fought tooth and claw against any 9/11 investigation, including even having a 9/11 commission, and eventually reluctantly agreed to having a 9/11 commission hold hearings behind closed doors, in which the Government officials, (Bush and Cheney) refused to testify under oath. Hmmmmm .... sounds fishy already.
But right after 9/11, most Americans swallowed the official conspiracy theory hook line and sinker, without question.
This "official conspiracy theory" asserts that a group of Saudi dissidents with a well-known track record of association with terrorists came to the US, learned to fly at an official "big-jet" training and simulation facility.
On 9/11, they put teams onto several jets, and overpowered the passengers and airline employees, subduing them with box-cutters!
They then supposedly proceeded to expertly fly these planes into various targets, which include the Twin Towers in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
(Oh yes, they were noticed! A local FBI agent requested permission to investigate, and for some reason, permission was denied! http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,249500,00.html You will note in this article, the Director of the FBI said there would be an investigation. Never happened.)
On 9/11, many strange things happened that defy expert explanation. Steel-framed buildings, that can burn for 24 hours without damage to the structural steel, according to the experts, just fell down. And at the World Trade Center, Building 7, which was not hit, just fell down all on its own much later in the day. Suspicious? To the rest of the world, very suspicious. To this day, most countries around the world have a popular majority opinion that the US Federal Government was involved in the demolition of the Twin Towers, and particularly Building 7.
But Americans have a long history of being True Believers.
A rather disturbingly large percentage of Americans “know” that science is dead wrong. Man must have walked with dinosaurs, in their minds, because they believe the earth is only a few thousand years old. Scientific investigation is extremely unreliable, because everything they must believe is explicitly laid out in the Bible. And if science contradicts their Bible, science must be wrong.
These people learn to Believe from birth. The alternative to belief is investigation, which the enemy of True Believers, because it often discovers things that invalidate their "True Beliefs".
Now the rest of the world has been skeptical from the start. They do not see the America that most Americans see from America. They see what America does to the Rest Of the Western World, (“ROTWW") because that's where they live. And sometimes, the view is not very pretty.
As well, I would suggest the ROTWW, not having the same Fundamentalist religious approach as large numbers of Americans, is much more investigative, and for the most part, insists on reasonable standards of proof.
Personally, I think the jury is still out. I have listened to all the arguments; I understand the science of building demolition, and the chemistry of thermite. All I can say is, I certainly have not seen enough evidence to support the "Official Conspiracy Theory" of 9/11, this bunch of Saudis piloting planes into buildings.
Which brings me back to the current financial crisis.
I am fearful that Americans are again being asked to Believe in an official theory of what has happened to derail the economy. They are being thrown a few bones to chew on. Like, Auto Company executives flying around in corporate jets, and overpaid financial company execs.
But we are not seeing much emerge in the way of facts. We are not seeing any Investigation that really tears the lid off and allocates blame for the "closed eyes and stoopid" approach that Government took that allowed these problems to occur.
Oh, you might say it isn't Government's job to watch this. Really? Then why would it be Government's job to observe other clear and present dangers to the United States?
This is developing as a financial tsunami. It looks like it is just beginning, not nearing its end.
Yes, you are probably watching TV, and hearing all this reassuring talk about "little green shoots". But listen carefully, and what you will hear these same commentators say is "Well, I believe .......".
Don't pin your hopes on the Beliefs of these pundits. They are almost always wrong.
Stop Believing. Start Investigating.
