"The Pirates of the Caribbean"

There is a ride at Disneyland called Pirates of the Caribbean. It is a gentle sort of roller coaster ride through some movie theme pirate sets. Cannons go off, the pirates are fake scary, and there is some good music and sound effect material. I mention the Disney ride simply to illustrate the vast gulf between real pirates and those we have been exposed to by the media, of late. The supposed Somalia pirates.

They do not exist. There are no Somalia pirates. Whatever those extortionists from that part of the world are, they are anything but pirates. You see, it just does not compute, at all. For one thing, there just is no way that some twenty-five foot skiff, powered by an old outboard motor, can overtake and claim a huge transport ship at sea. Out there, on the real ocean, the waves run pretty high, the wind is unpredictable, and the currents are ever present. The big transports do not run close in to the shore. Those skiffs we see on the television would not fare well at all out on the surface of the wide open ocean, much less be able to run at twenty or thirty knots to overtake the ships. Then, how do you, as the captain of a pirate vessel, transport your men from the skiff to the big high ship? I mean, if you can latch on to the giant metal monster, in the first place? It is all beyond improbable. So assume the obvious. The pirates are revenue gatherers and sharers. They have the crew, or other interests located wherever the ship is from, coming from or going to, already in their pocket. They take the ship without combat or loss or violence of any sort. They 'hold the crew and cargo' for ransom. They get the money and depart. Then they quietly split the cash among all the paid off sources. The crew is one of those sources.

That is the only way this new piracy can work. The only. Real pirates kill people. All over the place. Just like in the old days. The violence, not the theft, is what brought all the civilized countries in the world down on them. How do you take a ship at sea that refuses to be taken? You shoot the hell out of it, lose some of your own people, then kill the survivors because you are mad as hell at them for hurting you! That was the way it was, and that is the way it would have to be today. Without all the communication we have today, that is. Now the 'pirates' can reach out through telephonic or computer means and contact their 'victims' to negotiate a deal. It is all money shifting. Who ends up with the money, really, and who loses it? Find the answers to those questions and you will have your pirates. And, trust me, you will be really really surprised!

The captain of that vessel, by the way, the one taken a few weeks ago, just spoke to Congress. Listening to him was just great good entertainment and high humor. He supposedly, and without serious injury to himself, surrendered his shop to the pirates overwhelming force. Then, while he was still (apparently) free aboard, he offered himself up as a hostage so his crew could go free. What a crock!!! Like any self-respecting 'real' pirate is going to take that deal? Why would he? Absolutely no reason whatever. And this 'heroic' captain, he is in front of our Congress speaking about how to prevent such occurrences in the future! Here is an easy and quick partial solution: Don't hire him, or his crew!!!

The media is playing right along with the whole pirate mythology. They do not care about the truth anymore at all. They just want headlines. They want heroes, fake or otherwise. They plainly have no surviving ethical standards. That factor alone is why nobody wants to watch them or read the newspapers. The Pirates are a huge manufactured lie. The Swine Flu is a lie. Torture is a lie (oh, we did it all right, but we did real torture, not this watered down 'sleep deprivation,' 'hanky-over-the-nose' crap!). What is going to come our way over the next few weeks? We can always bring back one of those, and maybe improve on one of them, here and there. More likely, however, we will have some more giant lies to merely replace those.

I wrote of 'Dark Matter' and the Uncertainty Principal last week. I am working away toward discussing the real problem about all of this. If everything is fake, then nothing is real. If the roof is fake, then making believe you are not wet when it rains is absolutely required. If the food is fake, then you must work very hard to believe that you are full, and not hungry. If the heating is fake, then you must find a way to think that you are not cold. Or not. You can look up and see there is no roof. You can check your waistline and tell that you are emaciated. You can check around and note the frost covering everything about you. If you do those things, and only if you do those things, can you get to a point where you take action. If some external source, or group of sources, is constantly selling you on the idea that those fake things are real, and you are believing that, then it is very very hard to take any action.

We are being sold a package, about life itself, by the media we allowed, and encouraged, to be in all of our lives. We have to start paying attention to what we can truly perceive for ourselves. We must stop listening, reading and looking at that tube and believing. We have to find a way to get back to reality. Only then can we take rational action to do anything about anything. Our roads and bridges are crumbling. Our space program is a tottering disaster of a fake. Our airlines are barely airlines at all anymore. Our car industry is in shambles. Our factories are broken down and closing, those that are left. You know these things to be true. You drive the roads and bridges. You see the factories, or the shells they once occupied. You ride on the cramped crummy airplanes. Do you see that? Our culture has lost its feelings of bliss and hope. Do you feel that? We have become a nation of depressed souls living off pyschotropic drugs and sleep medications. Do you understand that?

We are at the point where we have come to understand that what we are being presented, almost everywhere, is fake and phony. But we do not yet see the truth. We are in the Twilight Zone, caught between those two things. We are depressed, and have lost hope, because we cannot understand what to do about any of it. Yet.

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