Who Knows?
It has been a bit over six months since the last NOBULL was published. In that time, I have had several people asking me why I have not written anything in all that time. Cutting right to the chase, the answer to why there have been no NOBULLS in the past 6 months is that I no longer have any confidence at all that I know anything true and factual about what is happening in these United States of America. I have come to the conclusion that there is not a single source of political news that is not a lie; a lie of commission or a lie of omission. I have come to the conclusion that all the sources of news about what is happening in America has been thoroughly corrupted and distorted to serve the purpose of keeping the American people both divided and uninformed. There is no news but only narratives. And narratives are stories with only a grain of truth to provide the illusion of reality.
Am I exaggerating? Let’s look at a few issues and then, if you had to stake your life on knowing that what you believe about any one of the following issues is undoubtedly true, let me know and I will publish that truth to all my readers so they can know what you know.
COVID: Just how deadly is this disease? Have half a million or more Americans died from this disease of have most of them died because they were old, obese and suffering multiple other medical conditions that were the cause of their deaths? Do children get this disease or not? Are 95% or more of the cases no worse than a bad case of the flu or if you get it, it will kill you? And speaking of “getting it”, how do we know for sure that the tests work or whether they result in a lot of false positives? Assuming you got one of the several vaccines, are people who have been vaccinated still able to get the virus? Are the vaccines safe or are they actually the reason many people who received the vaccines are dying? Exactly how many vaccinated people have clearly died from the vaccine? And, do face masks work? How well do they work? Do they reduce the likelihood of getting the disease? By how much? Do people who wear masks all the time get sick from wearing the mask? Do we really have an epidemic of the unvaccinated? How many unvaccinated people have died in this recent resurgence of the virus? Are the vaccines effective against the new Delta variant or does it make sense to go back to social distancing and masking and closing businesses to control it? Should we be mandating vaccination? Is mandating vaccination for Covid the same as vaccinating people for small pox? How is the same or different?
These are a few and definitely not all of the questions that can be asked about this one issue of importance to Americans. Can you understand why I have not written about it? What source of information have you found that answers all these questions in a definitive manner? More importantly, what source of information have you found that can be trusted or not considered compromised by ulterior motives of profit, political bias, or intentional misinformation?
Want to try another issue? How about immigration and the border? Are people trying to enter our nation illegally because they are fleeing the dangers of criminality in their home countries or for jobs and a free lunch in the US? How many people are entering our country illegally each
month? How many people have illegally entered our country in the past 15 years and are currently living here? Can we get that answer in a census or is asking the question so intimidating it will drive the illegal population further underground? If DACA “children” were to be given a pathway to citizenship would that reduce or encourage further illegal immigration? For that matter, would sending American tax dollars to the home countries of illegal immigrants in order to help them provide jobs and eliminate crime an effective deterrent to illegal immigration? How do we know one way or another?
How about the issue of race in America? Are black people still suffering the economic effects of slavery 150 years later? Are white people all racist BECAUSE they are white and, without knowing it, have white privilege which is keeping black people economically and socially oppressed? Or do black people bear some personal responsibility for their economic poverty? Just how impoverished are blacks in America? How many “people of color” and how many white people live below the poverty line? What percentage of each is that? Is the assumption that all “people of color” are socially or economically depressed itself a racist idea? Is assuming all white people to be racist simply because of their race a racist idea? Have you found any unbiased source from which you can answer these questions?
What topic would you pick to write a factual, unbiased and meaningful NOBULL about? Election integrity and voter ID? How about whether 2020 election results should or should not be audited? Want to write about whether Joe Biden is or is not demented? Want to write the same about Trump? How about whether the FBI is or is not compromised? The Department of Justice? Was Bill Barr an honest broker or not? Are there two systems of justice in the United States? Are the laws being enforced or not enforced? Are the police good guys to be supported or bad guys with too much power? Is it the Proud Boys and white supremacists who are terrorists or Antifa and BLM? Is it better to protest what is believed to be a stolen election or what is believed to be police brutality? Is violence justified when one group or another is considered fascist or racist.
You can see that this list of issues and questions can go on and on. Can you ever recall a time when so many questions have been asked with so little unbiased information to provide answers? Frankly, I cannot. The social, political and economic landscape is opaque. We live in a fog of information that provides very little transparency and data from which to make up our minds. It is possible to provide such data. But instead of providing data, media outlets are providing opinion. The data they provide is only that fraction of the data that supports their narrative. And we are left with only one conclusion: the media, all of it, conservative, liberal, and everything in between is purposely being manipulated to keep people divided and uninformed.
What is the effect on “we, the people”? First and foremost, we become confused and without direction. In this condition, we are vulnerable to being told stories that urge us in one direction or the other. We may have questions that the stories do not address. But pay no mind to those questions because there are others who think just like you.
We stop talking to half the population that buys into a different narrative from the one we have bought into. When we stop talking, we cannot unite against the common enemy which is the story tellers. The media is a manipulative power that influences person A and person B to fight each other rather than against the instigator of the fight, the media and those who control it.
Because we are all aware that there is more to the story than the one we are being told, we become paralyzed and unable to act. We keep waiting for the end of the story, the ending we are hoping for. We keep asking questions about the stories but we do not demand data and facts about what is actually happening. We do not reject all the narratives and biased reporting. We take no action because we have no idea in what direction to act. Every direction leads to more division, more conflict and fewer solutions. We remain happily in the fog of unknowing. We know we are lost, we know we don’t know which way is “out”, but we keep waiting for the sun to come out before we move. Our voices are silenced except to scream at those who believe a different story. We don’t think to raise our voices at the media and demand they stop telling the stories, the narratives, and simply tell us ALL the information and not just part of it.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sights as well as the media giants like Fox, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Gateway Pundit…all of them on both sides, are playing to the audiences that have bought their narratives. THEY HAVE NO INTENTION OF LETTING US DECIDE.
This is not happening by accident. It is coordinated and it is intentional. Those who would destroy the great American experiment of individuality and individual choice know that the media has divided us into more controllable groups. It is easier to control large groups than millions of individuals. Large groups divided against each other ends in either paralysis of action or civil conflict. Those who would destroy America don’t care which it is. Both serve their purpose. And their purpose is the destruction of the less controllable individual in favor of the more controllable collective.
We have been taught over the past hundred years that as individuals we have no power. We have been taught that the only power to be had is by banding together as collectives of common interests. And, I believe, we have learned that lesson far too well. What we have not understood is that our collective groupings are not real. I do not think like all white people. I do not believe as all Christians, I do not agree with all conservatives. That’s not true of just me but of you and everyone else. No one completely thinks, feels, and believes as some defined group. We are individuals. We disagree with each other even on some of the things we think we agree on. We are not the same. We are all different.
Attempts have been made to make us think we are fighting for acceptance of individual differences but the fact is, the reality is that individual differences are almost all that exist. The one way we are the same is in our common humanity. After that, we are all different. Were we to realize that, we would not have debates about white people and black people. As a white person, I might recognize you as a black person but I would recognize that being a black person doesn’t make you in the least bit like any other black person. You would be far more than just a black person. You would be more than your skin color. You would be an individual.
By dividing us into groups that allegedly all think alike, the media is the main conduit through which our individuality is being lost. The media gives us two stories to believe, deceiving us into thinking that our individuality is expressed by the choice of which story to believe. All the while, we are being guided and manipulated into various collective groupings with which we might have some things in common but not most things. We imagine that within these groupings, we all agree with each other. That is an illusion. It is not true, not real. WE ARE INDIVIDUALS. Until we reassert this truth, we will gradually and most assuredly lose our individualism and with it our freedom. We will, as a collective, be ultimately forced to think as a collective. Our individual differences will be silenced in favor of someone else’s “truth” just as they are being silenced by anonymous computer algorithms at Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere.
Fighting each other is senseless. The fight is not AGAINST others but FOR the right to our own individualism and that of others. Let the fight be for individualism and with it individual responsibility, individual thought, individual differences in skills, abilities and talents, individual motivation and achievement, and individual choice. Once we make the fight for the preservation of our individuality, respect for that of others becomes a priority. The recognition of each person’s individuality allows them to live their lives as they choose it and to accept the individual responsibility for and consequences of the choices they make. Stereotypes about people disappear as every person is recognized as an individual and not part of a group. No one has to think like me because it is recognized as a reality that no one does.
The slow but steady yet purposeful erosion of our individuality has resulted in a slow but steady yet purposeful movement toward collectivism. We have come to think of ourselves as members of groups rather than as individuals. And we are being led to believe that all the other members of our group think and believe as we do. It is not true. It is not what is real. We must remember our individuality.
